Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race 9781609386191, 9781609386184

Citation preview

VERSO RUNNINGHEAD

E M A R G IN S H T M O R F E SQUE

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PREFACE

E & C U LT U R FA N D O M rsen, d Katherine La Paul Booth an series editors

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ns i g r a M e h t from

D RACE N A M O D FA N NDE R U K M IN I PA

U N IV E R S IT Y IO WA C IT Y

RESS O F IO WA P

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U N I V E R S I T Y O F I O WA P R E S S , I O WA C I T Y 5 2 242 Copyright © 2018 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by Teresa W. Wingfield No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Pande, Rukmini, 1984– author. Title: Squee from the margins : fandom and race / by Rukmini Pande. Description: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2018] | Series: Fandom & culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010741 (print) | LCCN 2018037921 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-60938619-1 | ISBN 978-1-60938-618-4 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Fan fiction—History and criticism. | Literature and the Internet. Classification: LCC PN3377.5.F33 (ebook) | LCC PN3377.5.F33 P36 2018 (print) | DDC 809.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010741

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To all the fans of color who create, critique, and most importantly, squee. You are fandom.

INDEX

235

FANDOM & CULTURE Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture

by Megan Condis

Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide

edited by Katherine Anderson Howell

Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race

by Rukmini Pande

Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures

edited by Rebecca Williams

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction 1

1. Dial Me Up, Scotty: Fandoms as Platforms for Women’s Online Identity  21

2. Can You Stop the Signal? Online Media Fandom as Postcolonial Cyberspace  45

3. Aang Still Ain’t White: Postcolonial Praxis  75 4. Recalibration Necessary, Mr. Spock: Race and the Dynamics of Media Fandom  111

5. But, How Is That Sexy? The Fan Fiction Kink Meme  Conclusion: Toward Decolonizing Fan Studies  185 Notes 197 References 203 Index 229

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been written with the support of not just a village but an entire cosmos. Its evolution has been solely due to the unwavering support of my colleagues, family, and friends.

Because this book would not have existed without my initial accep-

tance into the PhD program at the University of Western Australia, I’d like to thank my advisor, Dr. Shalmalee Pakekar, for her patience, intellectual guidance, dedication, and kindness. Thank you, Shalmalee, for trusting me in the research process, even when I didn’t trust myself, and for enabling me to truly believe in my project. I was also extremely lucky to have found an amazing support system of friends and colleagues in Australia. Thank you, Lauren, for being my anchor and a link to home I never expected to find in a foreign land. Charmaine, Jess, and Steven, you are my rocks, sounding boards, and teachers. And thank you, Maia, for giving me a second home to escape to when everything felt overwhelming.

I am also extremely grateful to my aca-fan network, which stretches

around the world. Thank you, Swati, Amanda, Kajori, and Samira for staying with me through this long journey. I also must acknowledge my debt to Lori Morimoto and Allison McCracken, my entirely unexpected academic mentors, whose kindness and generosity enabled me to make connections and engage with fan studies as a discipline. Thank you as well to Robin Anne Reid, Kathy Larsen, and Kristina Busse, who gave me invaluable feedback on the project in its early stages and made it so much better. I’d also like to thank Paul Booth and Bertha Chin for their crucial feedback.

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I would also like to thank everyone associated with the University of

Iowa Press, especially my two lead editors, Catherine Cocks and Ranjit Arab. Thank you, Catherine, for encouraging me to submit the book proposal. And thank you, Ranjit, for your continuing support through the process of getting this published and for all the conversations and laughter along the way.

Finally, and most importantly, thank you to my family—Amma, Devika,

and Radhika. I don’t have the words to express how much your unconditional love, support, and belief in me has meant over these years. You raise me up.

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PREFACE

Fan studies’ foundational texts establish media or participatory fandom as an area of interest for scholars because of its potential to overturn stereotypes about fans as unquestioning consumers of popular cultural texts. In these early texts, media fandom’s transformational interactions with these texts—most notably through fan fiction but also expanding to other fan work—is seen as especially significant because these spaces were dominated by women (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Russ 1985; Penley 1992; Lamb and Veith 1986). The discipline has expanded in its scope since then, and the idea of the fan as a resistant actor or poacher has been queried on various grounds (Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005; Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss 2007a; Johnson 2007; Jenkins 2006a). Nevertheless, a strong utopian strain remains evident in theoretical discussions of fan work in particular, especially discussions that explicitly queer source texts. This is based on demographic data that indicate that many participants in these spaces identify as queer women. Such transformational fan work is seen to function in an intertextual and communitarian matrix, which is self-reflexive and progressive in its politics (Hellekson and Busse 2006; Busse, Lothian, and Reid 2007; Hellekson 2009a; Coppa 2008, 2014; Zubernis and Larsen 2012; Stein 2015).

What remains absent in these examinations is any sustained examina-

tion of the racial makeup of these communities, both in terms of participants and in the choices of characters and texts that form the focus of media fandom’s transformational activities. My central argument builds from Rebecca Wanzo’s (2015) critical intervention in fan studies, wherein she maintains that

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the continued and glaring absence of race as an aspect of analysis in fan studies is not just because of oversight but because this absence troubles foundational assumptions regarding its subversive potential and inclusive ethos.

This book explores the ramifications of such trouble in line with Sara

Ahmed’s (2010) conceptualization of what she calls the feminist killjoy. What does it mean to be a fandom killjoy with regard to being the subject of and reacting to racism in fandom spaces? How do conceptions of shared pleasure and intertextual communities interface with these dynamics? These are some of my key questions. I will use data from respondent interviews with nonwhite fans from all over the globe, as well as examination of specific practices such as racebending in order to go some way in answering them.

I contend that whiteness has been an unarticulated yet core structur-

ing mechanism within both fan studies and in media fandom communities that actively works to elide, erase, and excuse its operations. My arguments will systematically deconstruct these truisms. I will interrogate the ways in which such communities are seen to work, using the respondent data from my interviews to interrupt the accepted accounts of media fandom history as well as their contemporary functioning.

By positioning media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace, I am able to

interrogate the operations, flows, interruptions, and reinscriptions of representational power within fan spaces without falling back onto simplistic ideas of resistance and co-optation. It also enables me to approach the complex identities of my nonwhite interview respondents with appropriate nuance. Because the racial identity of media fans is seen as something additional to, rather than constitutive of, their experiences in media fandom spaces, a serious consideration of its effects on generalized fan studies frameworks continues to be deferred. I aim to end that deferral and highlight the ways in which the choice of inclusive methodological and theoretical frameworks allow for a more nuanced discussion of the operations of contemporary media fandom communities.

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In Rainbow Rowell’s 2013 novel Fangirl, the protagonist’s, Cather “Cath” Avery’s, navigation of online spaces as a popular fan fiction writer intersects with her real life in various ways. She defends, among other things, her unnatural interest in the fictional character of Simon Snow and the charge of having no real friends as opposed to those on the internet, thus encapsulating both her attitude to popular cultural media texts and her participation in the online communities that facilitate such interactions. Cath remarks, “I’m just really active in the fandom.” To this, her interrogator, Reagan, enquires, “What the fuck is ‘the fandom’?” (42). To anyone familiar with the popular rhetoric around online media or participatory fan communities, these are well-worn accusations, coalescing around the ideas of overinvestment in the frivolous and social maladjustment stemming from a lack of real-world engagement.

However, within this same moment, it also seems like in the last decade

the image of the more generalized fan has gone through a reclamation of sorts. Spurred by the sprawling success of popular culture conventions like the annual San Diego Comic-Con, and with dedicated nerdy audiences propelling media companies like Marvel and DC Comics into international powerhouses, multinational media corporations now vie with each other to woo these same audiences. Often this takes the form of encouraging fan practices once seen as weird or deviant, such as cosplay, fan art, and in some cases even fan fiction. While the monetization of fan practices and the manipulation of these dedicated viewers is nothing new, the advent of social media

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has led to a whole new level of mainstreaming and its attendant hypervisibility for media fan cultures. Famously characterized as subcultural poachers by Henry Jenkins (1992), who drew on Michel de Certeau’s (1984) notion of poaching, fans today seem, at least on the surface, to be more mainstream than ever before. However, as I will expand on in a moment, which fans are considered the most valued remains enmeshed in a complex matrix of identity markers, most notably those of race, gender, and sexuality.

It is in this conflicted moment, where the lenses through which fan

communities and their participants are simultaneously refracted from multiple angles, that I would like to focus on the last question posed to Cath by her interlocutor—that is, “What the fuck is ‘the fandom’?” At first glance it seems like a relatively easy question to answer. Media or participatory fandom refers to loosely interlinked interpretive communities, mainly comprising women and spanning a wide range of demographics in terms of age, sexuality, economic status, and, national, cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, formed around various popular cultural texts (Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002; Hellekson and Busse 2006). While the roots of these communities lie in science fiction conventions located in the United States and the United Kingdom, their dominant medium today is various internet-enabled platforms. These enable the production and circulation of fan works including fan fiction, fan art, meta commentary, and fan videos.

Further, these communities are marked by a high degree of interactivity

and intertextuality among participants and increasingly with source texts, their authors, and associated celebrities. Most significantly, their most distinguishing feature is their engagement in transformative activities, wherein the source texts are repurposed in some way to produce fan works. These activities are frequently framed as resistant and subversive, particularly those that concern the genre of slash fan work—that is, texts in which two male characters are paired in a romantic or erotic relationship (Lamb and Veith 1986; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1992).

This is also a commonly referenced framework to approach “the fan-

dom” within the field of fan studies, which has grown increasingly prolific over the last two decades. As the interest in fans and audiences of popular cultural media texts has exploded, so too has the amount of scholarship being published around their activities. Functioning as it does in the modern neoliberal academic ecosystem, in the interstices of more established

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university departments, fan studies remains a thoroughly multidisciplinary field. As such, it draws from markedly different methodological and disciplinary traditions, including feminist studies, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, sociology, and anthropology. Such diversity is productive of nuanced scholarship, but it can also lend itself to a repetition of theorization as a result of a lack of crossover (Hellekson 2009b). It is, however, possible to examine what trends dominate the field and what blind spots continue to affect it.

The initial wave of fan studies scholars, initially identified by Jonathan

Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss (2007b, 1) but commented on by successive scholars, were invested primarily in reclaiming the image of the fan from the stereotype of being uncritical consumers of lowbrow popular culture (Penley 1991; Jenkins 1992). John Fiske (1992) was especially influential in laying the foundations of theoretical frameworks that conceptualized (white) fans as niche audiences that engaged in complex processes of meaning making with regard to popular cultural texts, an activity that had traditionally been seen to be the domain of highbrow culture. This was rooted specifically in concerns of gender and age, with Fiske mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualizations of taste as linked specifically to access to capital. For Fiske, the shortcomings of Bourdieu’s analytical model were the omission of axes of identity apart from class and a consideration of “forms of ‘popular cultural capital’ produced by subordinate social formations” that could also be powerful for those particular sections of society. Fiske further maintained that “fandom offers ways of filling cultural lack and provides the social prestige and self-esteem that go with cultural capital” (1992, 33). Ironically, although Fiske notes the absence of race as an axis of identity within this model, he laments that he has “not found studies of non-white fandom” (32).

This first wave’s overemphasis on the active and resistant nature of

media fans—sometimes dubbed the “fandom is beautiful” stage of fan studies—has undergone critique since then. These critiques have taken various forms, with Matt Hills (2002) cautioning against repetitive moral dualisms—fans versus producers, fans versus academics, active audiences versus passive consumers—while calling for more situated analyses of fan activity. In response, some scholars have focused their attention on modes of fandom activity that are less invested in resistant meaning making, such as sports fandom, cult collectors, and fan tourism patterns (Crawford 2004;

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Alden 2007; Brooker 2007; Bloom 2002); others have examined the ways in which transmedia narrative strategies—the leveraging of multiple platforms, including digital and internet-enabled ones by content creators—are increasingly co-opting fan labor (Jenkins 2006a; Hagen and Wasko 2000; De Kosnik 2009; Scott 2009).

Still others have focused on fans as amateur producers for profit, who

manage to leverage their popularity within fan circles to launch their own careers. One famous example is E. L. James’s publishing of Fifty Shades of Grey (2012), which was originally a work of fan fiction based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8). However, there have been numerous other examples, with fans monetizing their creative work in the form of podcasts, fan art, fan comics, fan movies, and so on (Williamson 2005; Anelli 2008; Philippe 2011; Flegel and Roth 2016). Most recently the tension between such pro fans and original copyright holders has resulted in a lawsuit brought by Paramount studios against the producers of the Star Trek fan film Axanar (Perton 2016).

Nevertheless, despite these developments, there remains a strong focus

on the figure of the fangirl—someone much like Cath. This can be traced to the foundational texts of Joanna Russ (1985), Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith (1986), and Constance Penley (1991), who are all heavily invested in the particular ways women fans engage with popular cultural texts. This thread of theorization has remained influential, and there has been a sustained effort to ground the analysis of media fandom communities in what can be seen as generally feminist methodologies focusing on gender and sexuality as key axes of interrogation. Even as the aforementioned critiques—broadly considered the second wave of fan studies—have argued for a broadening of conceptualizations of significant fan activity beyond transformative and active audiences, some scholars fear the sidelining, once again, of female fans, who are seen as more marginal than male fans to discussions of monetizeable fan activity (Stanfill 2013). Louisa Stein (2015) reiterates these ideas while situating her own study, observing, Issues of gender and sexuality are key to fan traditions of media production, including understandings of fan fiction as pornography written by and for women, the ever-evolving traditions of slash fan fiction as queer critique, and fan vidding as a forum for unmasking gender tropes in popular media. . . . Furthermore, as corporate media producers modify notions of the

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fan and fandom to meet their needs, gender and sexuality become central points of conflict, affecting whom commercial media producers will address and acknowledge as their audiences. (11)

Stein’s analysis points to the ways in which this tradition of theoriza-

tion has enabled and perpetuated erasures in conceptualizations of fangirls like Cath. My practice has often been to place in parentheses the specific descriptors of fangirls, including disparities in gender identity, racial, ethnic, and cultural identity, nationality, able-bodiedness, and age. I do this in order to complicate my own declaration of what these participants look like and to reflect on the ways in these specific identity markers are repeatedly footnoted in the broader field of fan studies itself in order to focus on the “more important” nodes of gender and sexuality.

What remains unacknowledged in most papers, presentations, key-

note addresses, books, or edited collections on media fan communities is that when “the fandom” or fangirls are discussed, the referents of these terms remain US- or UK-centric popular media texts and white, cisgender, middle-class women located in the United States or the United Kingdom. In Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s influential Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), for instance, there is no specific examination of racial/ethnic or cultural identity in online fandom spaces. In another significant anthology—Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (Larsen and Zubernis 2012)—only one essay references tensions around race in fandom spaces, framing it as an exceptional case (Coker 2012). Even a more recent publication, The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures (Duits, Zwaan, and Reijnders 2014) has only one essay explicitly on racial issues, with Steve Redhead (2014) discussing racism in (nontransformative) football fandoms. Further, while Transformative Works and Cultures, an academic journal that is currently one of the most established platforms for disseminating critical work in the field, published a guest-edited special issue on race in fandom in 2011, the only article that referenced Western media fandom communities (Stanfill 2011) did not focus on nonwhite fans within those spaces. Other recent scholarship, such as my chapter in Seeing Fans (Pande 2016a) and my coauthored article on race and femslash (Pande and Moitra 2017), also in Transformative Works and Cultures, is emblematic of the pattern of allocating certain sections of larger anthologies and journal issues to the consideration

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of the effects of racial identity while more broad-based considerations of fandom can proceed without interruption.

Relatedly, even though there is an increasing acknowledgment of the

fact that fan communities are now global, the material ramifications of this development are rarely acknowledged. While there has been some recent work on transnational and transcultural fandoms (Chin and Morimoto 2013), these are invariably located as outside of “the fandom” and usually somewhat othered as a result of unfamiliarity with the source texts. As one scholar in the field (whom I leave anonymous) once told me, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to present about a fandom everyone already knew about?” In another instance, a Brazilian fan scholar noted, “I’m so tired of being on the Brazilian panel at conferences, instead of being included within fan studies tracks.” Any discussion of transnational and transcultural fandom thus seems to circulate around fan cultures that are demonstrably outside the dominant paradigm that grants certain texts and fandoms canonicity, either by geographic location or language. Examples of these areas include studies of Korean pop music (K-pop), Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animation), and Bollywood (Madrid-Morales and Lovric 2015; Newitz 1994; Punathambekar 2007). In some cases, where the source texts are the same, fans from non-US and non-UK locations are differentiated from “the fandom” by language use, such as Larisa Mikhaylova’s (2012) study of Russian Star Trek (2009) fandom.

This is valuable work, but such work once again displaces the work-

ings of racial identity as the most relevant and obvious to something other than traditional media fandom, which can continue to tread largely familiar theoretical pathways. Because of their status as minorities within Western media fandoms, nonwhite fans are seen to interrupt normative operations of such structures only in specific contexts when they make themselves visible. What I mean by this assertion is that race is only seen to be a relevant factor for theorizations about Western fandom communities when it is seen to be specifically interpolated by the presence of a significant character or issue that explicitly foregrounds the operations of nonwhite racial identity. In this construction, because whiteness is not considered a racialized identity with specific effects, its operations on fandom structures can be presented as normative.

I would like to tease this out further with an example of how such theo-

retical whitewashing, as I term it, proceeds. In such an atmosphere, scholars

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who are interested in the fandom around the critically acclaimed and cult hit television show Hannibal (2012–15) are free to concentrate their analysis on its operationalization of universal tropes regarding horror, monstrosity, and cannibalism, without needing to acknowledge the fact of their deep racialization. The show’s acclaimed manipulation of a charged queer subtext between the focal characters of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelson) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) has been reflected in a devoted base of fan writers who have used this scaffolding to generate a great deal of fan fiction that also explores the taboo intermingling of pathology, murder, and desire.

This has understandably generated considerable scholarly interest

around the same themes. What has not been registered so far in this interest is any acknowledgment of the fact that Hannibal’s whiteness is at the heart of the narrative’s ability to aestheticize the aforementioned taboos. To date, any discussion of race in Hannibal has revolved around the position and role of tertiary nonwhite characters within the narrative—such as Beverly Katz (Hetienne Park) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne)—instead of considering the whiteness that is necessary for the entire conceit of the show (and further, the fandom) to function in the first place (mayatalksfemedia 2014; Park 2014).

In examining the fan work around Hannibal as grounded in the explora-

tion of universal horror tropes, these discussions inevitably elide the fact that these tropes are specifically white, with their subversiveness only evident under such conditions. Hannibal fandom’s subversiveness thus depends on the ways in which white crime and white evil are considered almost inherently worthy of exploration and nuance in a way that is simply not available for nonwhite characters in similar molds. To put it bluntly, Black and brown cannibalism cannot be aestheticized tropes that may be explored in exquisitely detailed cinematography because they have already been operationalized against entire populations, rendering them monstrous to significantly different ends, namely imperialism and conquest (Berglund 1999; Brantlinger 2011; Forbes 2011). This is not to say that these tropes and their attractiveness are not still a worthy object of study; rather, because their whiteness is allowed to operate without being named as such, race may be considered as an additional and incidental layer to any analysis rather than as a factor at its core. An additional rhetorical strategy that is increasingly common in the field is an acknowledgment of the diversity of participants (usually in a footnote or an aside), which is followed up by a simultaneous disavowal or

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deflection of the need to actually engage with these issues. This deflection or disavowal can only continue to function in a space where racial and ethnic identity is somehow seen as additional to gender and sexuality. This continually deferred place of racial identity in fan studies as a disciplinary field is therefore a result of these multiple strategies of structural whiteness. This is not something unique to fandom studies, of course, as the effects of positioning whiteness as the (unsaid) default has also haunted feminism and queer studies (Carby 1996; Johnson 2001; Ford 2010; Thomlison 2012). Perhaps it is no coincidence that the field of fan studies, which draws much of its theoretical strength from both of these disciplines, is similarly discomfited.

Another issue is that fan studies publications are often organized

around a specific fandom. TV programs like Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–) and the BBC’s Sherlock (2010–), as well as long-running franchises like Star Wars, have been generative of these kinds of collections. These have resulted in nuanced and detailed scholarship, but they also have the effect of sectioning off certain fan spaces. In order to fully address the complexity of fan interactions, we must also look at fan sites as complex continuums rather than as isolated compartments. It is therefore imperative that we bring intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Bobo 1995; hooks 1996; Rodríguez 2003) into the heart of our analyses of fandom spaces—not just as part of a list at the beginning of papers and presentations to show an awareness of these aspects of identity, but also with the same weight given to gender and sexuality. This is vital so as not to reinscribe their operations and once again relegate racial identity as a topic fit only for special issues or individual sections in anthologies, with the rest of the field remaining unaffected.

This is not to say that this lack has gone unnoticed. André M. Carrington

dwells on the ways in which, despite there being “a generation of cultural criticism published about the ways in which popular texts resonate with the interests of attentive, actively engaged fans and academic researchers concerned with gender, sexuality, class, national identities, and changing technologies” (2016, 1), it has failed to provide the tools for dealing with the effects of racial identity, particularly Blackness, within the genre. More particularly, Rebecca Wanzo’s (2015) significant intervention into the genealogy of fan studies as a field points to the glaring whiteness of its bibliographies and the excision of the theoretical apparatuses and academic histories that do take into account the influence of race on the experience and interpretation

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of popular culture.1 Wanzo’s focus is specifically on African American cultures and the rich tradition of criticism that has resulted around popular music, film, and television, but the critique also holds for other apparatuses that foreground racial, ethnic, and cultural identity along with gender and sexuality. Wanzo observes that this excision and erasure is grounded in a failure to see race and specifically whiteness as a racialized identity as opposed to a universal one; she also underlines the fact that “one of the reasons race may be neglected is because it troubles some of the claims—and desires—at the heart of fan studies scholars and their scholarship” (¶1.4). Kristen Warner points out, “The stark reality is that the only people who are allowed to be visible within fandom and imagined to be fans by the media industries are White men and women” (2015a, 33). It is also key to note that both these critiques reference Fiske’s (1992) lament of not being able to find nonwhite fandoms, and both point out that such continued oversight in both media industries and fan studies is not coincidental but rather a matter of institutionalized erasure where some fans, both men and women, are simply not imaginable as fans.

This failure of imagination is a crucial point, and it forms the impetus

behind much of my own work. In the course of this book, following on from Wanzo’s intervention, I wish to trouble some of fan studies’ foundational ideas, histories, and recurring theoretical paradigms, specifically by bringing issues of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity into direct conversation with them. By doing so, I will demonstrate how there are markedly different experiences and forms of “the fandom” and “the fangirl” that interrupt and disrupt dominant ideas of what occurs in such fan spaces. This discomfort or trouble that is introduced by an insistence on foregrounding race in the functioning of fan communities, and by extension fan studies, is a concern of mine throughout this book. However, a particular event within my personal fandom communities brought these issues into focus. I include an account of it here because I think that it brings together the main threads of my overarching arguments particularly well.

How (Not) To Talk About Race: A Fandom Guide

The release of The Force Awakens, the 2015 entry in in the influential Star

Wars franchise, caused a great deal of excitement for fans across the world.

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The film was extremely successful by any reckoning—box office receipts, critical acclaim, and media fandom communities. The movie was praised in particular for the way in which it (re)deploys the familiar narratives of the original series but broadens their meanings by placing unexpected individuals within those roles. In particular the roles of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) play on established archetypes— the Chosen One, the Conflicted Hero, the Hot-Shot Pilot—but their particular individual identities force a reconsideration of how these story arcs usually play out when given to white male actors (Lane 2016). Indeed, only one new main character role was given to a white male actor: the antagonist, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

This was largely seen as cause for celebration, particularly among media

fan communities that have seen increasing support for diverse casts that disrupt societal manifestations of sexism and racism. In terms of the fan work produced, the characters of Finn and Poe initially generated much attention and traction, as the chemistry between the two actors had a predictable effect on fans who gravitate toward the genre of slash. What was a departure from historical trends (wherein fans have tended to gravitate to conventionally attractive white male actors) was that John Boyega is of Nigerian British descent, while Oscar Isaac is from Guatemala.

For some nonwhite slash fans in particular, this was a sign that fandom

had finally found the right combination of plot, character type, and chemistry that had so far remained elusive over fifty-odd years of documented slash writing. Although nonwhite characters have occasionally been placed in secondary pairings that might garner some amount of fan work, particularly fan fiction, they have never been the focus of those ships that have generated fandom juggernauts that spawn thousands of works like those from television shows like Supernatural (2005–) or movies like those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

However, as some time went by, fandom saw a sharp drop-off in the

works around the Finn/Poe pairing, with another pairing coming to the forefront: Kylo Ren and a side character who had only a few lines in the movie, General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson). At the time of this writing, this is the juggernaut pairing in the fandom, with fan fiction writers having invented most of Hux’s personality from scratch, adhering around popular fandom tropes. This development was paired with the fact that the major het (fandom

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parlance for heterosexual) ship had formed around the characters of Kylo Ren and Rey, once again cutting out Finn, who canonically had a narrative arc that placed them in a close relationship.

These trends have been set out in graphical form on a popular blog

run by a fan, destinationtoast, who occasionally analyzes the number of fan works being posted on the fan site Archive of Our Own (AO3; https:// archiveofourown.org/). The post is an extremely disheartening one for many nonwhite fans (and allies), who point to an insidious pattern seen in fandom after fandom, and now striking this one: sidelining and erasing nonwhite characters. What makes the repetition of this pattern more significant is that this time, it occurs in relation to a source text that, for once, places those characters in roles of prominence. Adding fuel to the fire, fandom writers have decided to pick a character who not only has very few lines but who also participates in large-scale genocide and is depicted in the film with distinctly Nazi-style imagery (destinationtoast 2016).

One widely circulated response to this is a piece of meta titled “Your

Vagina Is a Bigot; My Vagina Is a Saint” (Fanlore.org). A particular focus of the meta is slash ships because these form the basis of the original statistical analysis. The meta piece argues against the role of internalized racism on the part of fandom in this erasure. Instead, it blames those fans who, according to the author, make the writing of nonwhite characters a “joyless” experience, and further one “framed in fear.” These fans, the author argues, discourage fan writers from exploring the pairing by raising the bogeyman of racism with regard to the use of particular tropes in conjunction with the identities of Poe and Finn as Latino and Black men, respectively. In essence, the piece argues that this sort of policing is turning people off writing fun stories about the characters, and that such activism is therefore ruining everyone’s enjoyment of the fannish space. The piece ends with a “call for civility” in fan spaces and lays out a specific history of the creation of the AO3 and the allied Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) as a “safe space” for fan writers, especially those who write slash fan fiction, to enjoy themselves while pushing the boundaries of “acceptable” erotic writing.2

Some fans have reacted positively to this framing, but for those who

have long been concerned about ideas of representation and diversity in fan work, it was alienating and dehumanizing. I would have to agree with the latter group, not just in terms of the language and arguments that the post

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uses but also in its rewriting of a common fandom history that completely erases the multiple instances in which nonwhite fans have attempted to point out the deep racism evident in fandom’s treatment of nonwhite characters. I cite this particular post (out of the many other examples of similar arguments) because of the robust debate it generated and because its framing of fandom history is one that has been repeatedly validated and reinscribed, including within fan studies. This is not to say that there is no truth in this valorizing narrative of the creation of these subcultural spaces. Rather, I wish to contest the dismissal of critiques of the same as a new phenomenon by fans who want to claim a higher moral ground. This is a gross misreading of the current dynamics at play in media fandom spaces.

However, the post’s framing of what “the fandom” is has been useful

to me because it encapsulates my primary argument: that whiteness has remained the unexamined structuring force within discussions of the workings of media fandom communities up to the present moment. Wanzo’s (2015) argument illuminates one aspect of this structured exclusion by examining the erasure of those fans, fan practices, and academic analyses that identified themselves as specifically African American from the fan studies canon. Building from that position, I posit that the unexamined yet assumed whiteness of media fan spaces has allowed for successive theorizations about their workings to have now solidified into accepted histories. This positioning now forces any consideration of racial dynamics within those spaces to be considered as something additional to, rather than constitutive of, media fan identity. Because the activities of (white) women interested in reworking popular cultural texts have been the target of societal scorn (like Cath), the project for the reclamation of their practices has been constructed as a particular narrative around the ways in which fan communities engage with difference and how fan works engage with bodies and sexualities.

In this theoretical construction, any discussion of race becomes an

exception, an interruption, and a bringer of fandom drama. It also inevitably prompts rhetorical strategies that acknowledge that while of course racism within fandom communities plays some part in such trends, they are clearly more affected by the depictions of such characters in the source media. Another strategy is to place the blame of such historical erasures on structural racism in society itself, which such communities merely mirror. This of course is in direct opposition to the sustained strand of theorization

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that sees these spaces as resistant and subversive in their exploration of queer identities vis-à-vis the equally socially dominant notion of enforced heteronormativity.

This contradictory stance remains at the heart of most conceptualiza-

tions of fandom communities, particularly queer-coded ones, where theorizations of safe spaces rarely account for the erasures and silences they perpetuate, despite having participants point out repeatedly that those are damaging (Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 2006; Busse 2006). Further, given how often fandom is framed around these perceptions of pleasure for its community, the absence of analysis with regard to how complicated the evocation of that pleasure can be for erased or marginalized fans is glaring. These conceptualizations rarely account for those fans who have never been granted access to this safety or those who have to toe the dominant narrative line to be granted access or be welcomed. It is here that I wish to draw on Sara Ahmed’s (2010) concept of the feminist killjoy, which is also deeply bound up in the ideas of disruptions of shared pleasure and happiness. Ahmed powerfully posits that to be unseated by the table of happiness might be to threaten not simply that table, but what gathers around it, what gathers on it. When you are unseated, you can even get in the way of those who are seated, those who want more than anything to keep their seats. To threaten the loss of the seat can be to kill the joy of the seated. How well we recognize the figure of the feminist killjoy! How she makes sense! Let’s take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice.

This formulation of what is at stake in the maintenance of “the table of

happiness” is prescient when applied to fandom spaces. My analysis is primarily structured around the question of what it means to be a fandom killjoy—that is, for one’s pleasure to threaten the invocation of a broadly inclusive, woman-centric, and queer-coded community. To be a fandom killjoy as a nonwhite fan is a deeply alienating experience, as it involves either the internalized acceptance that certain pleasures and explorations are simply unavailable, or the identification of being someone who consistently brings unwanted drama to fan spaces. This is a fraught process, and one that animates my entire project.

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Additionally, in my following discussions of fan meta analysis on Twit-

ter, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2016) noted presciently, “How can fandoms know how many fans of color there are if most of us have been passing for decades? The answer is that they have no idea.” My theorizations draw on this notion of passing as well, as nonwhite fans have, as Thomas points out, often passed in and out of fandom spaces while being assumed white until proven otherwise. This assumption structures not just fandom communities but also, as I have made clear, fan studies.

Rebuilding Squee

In order to interrupt this particular entrenched narrative, this book has

to follow multiple tracks, both in terms of reexamining the history of such spaces and of interrogating their contemporary workings. My arguments are supported by data gathered during my research as well as by personal narratives drawn from one-on-one interviews. I spoke to a total of thirty-nine fans located in nine countries who identify broadly as fans of color, though their interpretations of that term vary widely.

“Your Vagina Is a Bigot; My Vagina Is a Saint” is yet another attempt to

reframe media fandom spaces as being invaded by social justice warriors. Part of the dismantling of these sorts of assumptions must be a filling in of lost or ignored histories of participation. This is precisely the animating impulse of the Chapter 1—an active tracing of these alternative or parallel experiences of media fandom history, wherein nonwhite fans have been present in, contributed to, and critiqued these spaces, only to be repeatedly glossed over. These narratives—both within traditional Western media fandom and within anime and manga fandoms—show that these spaces have always been demographically diverse, though certain mechanisms in their functioning, particularly on internet-mediated platforms, have led to an elision of this identity. This has resulted in their presence, once declared, as being seen as an exception. Thomas’s (2016) notion of passing influences my theorizations on much of this. The increased visibility of discussions of racism in fan spaces and fan works is influenced as much by an increase in number of these fans as it is by their increasing confidence in claiming these identities and building communities around them. These fans are in a way using fan studies methodologies when they (re)read the text of fandom

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communities via their own particular subjectivities. In doing so, they are talking back to theoretical structures and scholarship that have so far erased them. How fan scholars choose to respond to this challenge will be, I believe, a defining moment for the field.

In Chapter 2 I take up Wanzo’s (2015) call for diversifying the critical

genealogies of fan studies as a discipline. As she has presciently pointed out, it is the whiteness of its foundational theoretical apparatuses that continue to make race a “ubiquitous absence” in the field (¶1.3). Building from my rehistoricization of media fandom activities, I state my case for contemporary online fandom communities to be theorized as an example of a postcolonial cyberspace—an alternative, inclusive framework. I locate this theoretical positioning within a broader consideration of how issues of identity and global citizenship are articulated in both contemporary cybercultural and fan studies. A postcolonial cybercultural approach allows me to discuss the multiple identities of my respondents and their contentious relationships to Western media texts that form the focus of traditionally defined media fan communities, without collapsing into simplistic ideas about resistance, subversion, and co-optation. A key component in my argument here is an examination of the effects of changes in fandom platform use toward more dialogic models. This move has helped nonwhite fans engage with these issues more openly and has allowed the expansion of networks, some of which I have already traced. I also discuss the use of these spaces as consciousnessraising platforms and lay out possible lines of future theorizations of online media fandom communities.

In Chapter 3, I examine some of the ways in which nonwhite fans nego-

tiate with inhospitable fandom spaces. Fan studies has repeatedly emphasized the socially progressive ethos of media fandom communities. One of the more studied contemporary trajectories within this focus area has been the conceptualization of the fan as activist. Such grassroots activism has been identified as a possible new sphere for young people to engage in civic action. However, these global networks have significant unevenness, which is also reflected in contemporary media fandom spaces. These theorizations of fans as participants in civic action have so far neglected to examine how intersections of identity (apart from gender and sexuality) affect these efforts. To illustrate, I examine instances of fan activism that have foregrounded diversity in fan identity, such as the campaign around

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the animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–8). This campaign is especially crucial because it reflects the complexity of factors that affect how fans articulate these multifaceted identities. Within this frame, it is also vital to examine the ways in which nonwhite fans approach labels such as “fans of color,” so I analyze my respondents’ responses with regard to the connotations of this term in a globalized world. Finally, I focus on the interconnected practices of fan meta, head canons, and racebending in light of Edward Said’s (1993) formulation of contrapuntal reading to continue my arguments about media fandom spaces as postcolonial cyberspaces.

Chapter 4 focuses explicitly on the place of racial identity in contem-

porary theorizations around the workings of fan communities, particularly how it disturbs progressive orientations. Much of the theorization around the subversiveness of these spaces has revolved around certain truisms concerning their communitarian ethos, their liberal politics, and their resistant fan works as produced by women. These theorizations have so far failed to engage with axes of identity apart from gender and sexuality. I expand on my repeated contention—that whiteness is a structuring force in media fandom interactions—by examining what I term “fandom algorithms,” by which I mean the apparatuses of fandom, both in terms of communitarian etiquette and technical structures such as tagging and archiving, that are considered to be neutral and supportive of all characters and fans equally. In this formulation, the problems that have historically been faced by nonwhite fans in these spaces are seen to be reflective of larger societal trends that fandom spaces merely mirror. I draw from Lisa Nakamura’s (2013) conceptualization of glitch racism to expand on these ideas. To see these algorithms as structured by whiteness is to reframe their workings as nonneutral, and so interrupt the framing of racial identity in fandom spaces as something additional to existing models rather than constitutive of them.

In Chapter 5 I examine the practice of fan fiction in the context of

the fan fiction kink meme. Fan fiction has so far been broadly theorized as a form of democratized writing with specific connotations about what women (sometimes narrowly defined) desire. Theorization has oscillated between highlighting its affiliations with the genres of romance and/or pornography and perceiving it as less encumbered by the (hetero)sexist and patriarchal baggage of these mainstream productions. One aspect that has been neglected in these framings is the way in which the larger fields

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of romance and pornographic studies have themselves developed almost entirely separately. This has had the effect of shoring up certain assumptions about their respective audiences regarding their demographics and their use of texts. Both fields have been structured around largely uninterrogated correlations between participants’ gender and sexuality and their choice of such media. Leveraging the recorded knowledge of the diverse demographics of media fandom communities (including racial identity), I posit that these demand a reworking of the analytical frames used in theorizations of women’s desire, with much greater fluidity being permitted within them. I analyze this fluidity in the context of the fashioning and continual reworking of the category of kink in media fandom spaces. I posit that fan fiction communities, across genres, are spaces wherein formulations of the users and uses of pornographic/romantic texts may be questioned. I further posit that the space of the fan fiction kink meme functions as a useful microcosm for these exchanges.

I do not wish to give the impression that my arguments lead me in a

completely oppositional direction to much of what fan scholars have so far observed about these communities. I continue to maintain that media fandom spaces do function as online spaces wherein creative and transformational activities around popular cultural media texts allow for significant critical interventions into hegemonic narratives about gender, sexuality, race, religion, and disability, among other axes of identity. Nonetheless, these interventions are far from linear or uncontested, resulting in messy interactions that cannot be neatly mapped out onto theorizations of subversion, resistance, and co-option, particularly as they are currently articulated within the discipline. The silence around such fissures is particularly ironic as fandom spaces themselves have never been more vociferous in debating them, even as these debates disrupt, sometimes acrimoniously, normal fandom practices that are posited to accrue around pleasure and mutual enjoyment. These fandom killjoys are frequently accused of bringing drama into fandom spaces. It is the spirit of this drama that I wish to incorporate into my own work. I do so in order to animate broader, more inclusive, and more critical theoretical paradigms within fan studies so as to truly reflect the dynamic nature of online media fan communities today.

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Methods

This project was part of my doctoral dissertation. The research plan

and interview schedule were submitted to the ethics board of the University of Western Australia, and given approval. I circulated a call for respondents through fan platforms like LiveJournal, Tumblr, and Twitter, through personal fan networks and signal boosting by aca-fan accounts. Because I was looking for specific fan identities that were relatively harder to locate, I used a mixed-methods sampling combining both snowball and purposive sampling (Noy 2008; Tongco 2007).

I interviewed fans who identified as nonwhite and as having engaged

with fan work in some way (not limited to producing it). I left the door open for participants to talk to me about non-US and non-anglophone-based material, and many mentioned engaging with manga, K-pop, Bollywood, and so on, pointing to how multilingual fans can and do engage with multiple media sources and fan spaces. However, in this study, their experiences of marginalization concern mostly English-language-based media (mostly produced in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in English) and their transnational fan communities.

In the first stage, pilot testing indicated respondents would prefer to

give written answers to initial questions because the issues being broached were complex and they needed time to reflect on them. In this stage, I created a Google form to record responses. There was also a second stage, where, based on initial responses, follow-ups were conducted via Skype if additional data were required. Most of my questions, including those that asked for demographic descriptors, were open-ended because I wanted to see what terms my participants used to identify themselves and which aspects of their identity they thought were most important.

I conducted semistructured interviews with a total of thirty-nine respon-

dents located in nine countries. The respondents ranged in age from eighteen to forty-three, with most identifying as using feminine pronouns such as “she” and “her.” Two respondents clarified that they were genderqueer; one identified as intersex and one as cisgender male. In terms of sexuality, twenty-three respondents identified as queer in some form, ranging from asexual to demisexual. In terms of socioeconomic background, a majority of the respondents characterized themselves as middle class, although some

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qualified that as being dependent on parental support. Most interestingly, in terms of racial/cultural and ethnic identity, the data reflected twenty-five different self-classifications. The primary markers of such self-classification varied and included single nationality (Indian, Singaporean), doubled nationality (Chinese American), racial/ethnic categories (Latina, Black), skin color (brown), and local or indigenous terms outside traditional classification (Hapa). A number of respondents also identified as mixed-race individuals and as immigrants. Most respondents were at least bilingual. In terms of religion, although most respondents indicated that they were nonpracticing, those that mentioned a religious identity went on to correlate their experiences within fandom to that aspect quite strongly.

I used the coding software NVIVO by QSR to analyze initial patterns in

responses before using narrative analysis to examine the data. While coding, I discovered a disturbing pattern that ironically highlighted the very issues I would be discussing regarding the racism underlying seemingly neutral digital infrastructure in Chapter 4. While searching my data for synonyms to look for any similarities across interview responses, I realized that the automatic synonyms for the word “white” were “innocent,” “pure,” and “clean.” No such associations were present for any other color. As I wrote to NVIVO in my complaint about this, “The word ‘white’ has certainly been historically associated with all the aforementioned words. However, as has been pointed out by numerous researchers, this a racist pattern of word use which leads to the automatic association of criminality and deviance with people of color. For the NVIVO algorithm to use it as a matter of course encourages this continuing association in academic research that can have damaging consequences.” Although NVIVO’s response to my complaint was disappointing—they eschewed any direct culpability for the word associations—it was a valuable lesson early on in my coding process. It taught me to be highly attuned to the ways seemingly neutral tools of analysis were also highly loaded by institutional discrimination.

In terms of analyzing my data further, I found narrative analysis to

be the most suitable methodology (Riessman 2002; Alvermann 2014). This choice was influenced by the ways my respondents chose to communicate their journeys through fandom spaces, crafting highly individual storied trajectories. This also fits with a long historical tradition of fan spaces wherein fans will often tell and retell stories about certain memorable incidents,

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communities, and controversies. If the history of media fandom is, as I note in Chapter 1, nothing but the stories that fans tell each other, then it becomes important to pay attention to which narratives gain primacy and which become integrated into official histories that circulate in academia. By granting primacy to the stories and experiences of those fans whose entry paths into these spaces were inflected by othered positions, I have aimed to question and interrupt official histories.

It has been my goal to reflect the diversity of my respondents’ narratives

around issues of representation, escapism, self-identification, and discursive framings of their experiences. I have balanced Hills’s (2002) caution to not take fan talk as direct evidence of fan experience by foregrounding the ways in which fan accounts often clash and disagree with each other, but also highlighting where they interrupt more accepted histories of fan cultures. By privileging multivocality over any singular thread of easily mapped analysis, I hope to reflect the complex operations of race/racism within contemporary fan communities.

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Dial Me Up, Scotty FANDOMS AS PL ATFORMS FOR WOMEN’S ONLINE IDENTIT Y

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1

Ideas of what constitutes community continue to change as technological innovations mold the ways individuals choose to communicate, build and destroy networks, and find points of resonance and affinity along differential lines of interests and identities. Broadly, however, theorists have argued that when a group forms around a common symbolic structure, it comes to constitute a culture area of its own, which is not limited by anything other than the limits of communication (Strauss 1986; Sahlins 1976; Weber 1947; Lacan 1977; Derrida 1978). Influential cyberfeminist theorist Allucquére Rosanne Stone (1996) draws on Anslem Strauss’s formulation of group membership as “a symbolic, not a physical matter,” deeming it to apply particularly well to virtual systems (Strauss quoted in Stone 1996, 87). Stone extends and underlines the significance of this argument when characterizing cyberspace1 as a structure of community that could “validly be based upon symbolic exchanges of which proximity is merely a secondary effect” (87).

Media fandom has been seen as an example of a cybercultural commu-

nity based around symbolic exchange, as members are bound by a certain central interest but adopt different signifiers to concentrate their creative and fannish energies around. This is not to say that it does not encompass off-line elements of interaction; however, the primary enabling mechanism remains cybercultural. It is also important to pay attention to the points of disjuncture and difference in such communities. Although the histories of media fandom remain largely anecdotal, it is vital to make their frameworks

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as broad and inclusive as possible. As I note in the Introduction, to elevate one particular narrative about the establishment and development of these communities is to make invisible the experiences of participants who have taken varying entry pathways but have nonetheless contributed to their present forms. It is often maintained that media fandom is nothing but the stories that fans tell each other, but as these communities continue to gain mainstream attention, it is necessary to supplement and interrupt wellestablished narratives of their activities so as not to promote a monochromatic view of these spaces. This is one such effort.

Fandom’s move from off-line to online modes of interaction has been

the subject of significant scholarship within the field, and this informs my own analysis. My aim is not to recap this scholarship but rather to interrogate the gaps and silences in these histories. Default assumptions about the makeup of early online media fandom communities have had specific effects that actively work to make invisible the role of racial identity in these spaces, rather than this being a matter of oversight. My rehistoricization of these narratives foregrounds the ways in which fandom communities also incorporate the overlapping identities and activities of nonwhite fans within them. This in turn leads me to position their contemporary forms as an example of postcolonial cyberspaces in Chapter 2, where I analyze the ramifications of that theorization in terms of global media fandom considering issues of media, demographics, and changes in platform use.

Tracking Online Media Fandom

Susan Clerc (1996) traces the beginnings of the phenomenon of fan-

dom by charting its move from off-line activities—letterzines, newsletters, fanzines—to its current online form. Clerc also identifies this move as driven by the labor of women in particular: “Media fandom wouldn’t exist without women because more women than men do the communication work necessary to forge and sustain community” (218). Clerc presents a snapshot of the transition from smaller communities, necessarily limited by issues of distance and logistics, concerning the exchange of physical materials like fanzines, to fandom’s current form. Clerc points out: Fan women, though mechanically proficient and technologically savvy compared to the mainstream population, suffer from the same societal attitudes

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about gender and technology as everyone else. Women are also at an economic disadvantage: with less disposable income, they are not as likely as men to experiment with modems and software they aren’t familiar with. [For] Fan women there is very little benefit to Net access unless their friends have it. When that critical mass is reached and it becomes beneficial to go online, fan women will likely turn to other female fans as an informal support network. (219)

Clerc’s analysis therefore points to an early gendering of media fandom

spaces in particular, and the ways in which these community affiliations were crucial mediating factors in women using internet-enabled spaces. This presence has existed in various forms and is documented in studies such as Nancy Baym’s (2000) influential exploration of the Usenet newsgroup rec .arts.tv.soaps (abbreviated as r.a.t.s.), which records the activities of soap opera fans who are mostly women. Baym observes that this group is one of the oldest on the Usenet network and enjoys a high level of engagement. This is in opposition to more mainstream internet studies, which maintain that women are linguistically disadvantaged on forums like newsgroups (Wakeford 1997). Baym divides her respondents into heavy and light users, including lurkers (individuals who read posts but do not participate directly), but interestingly, those who participate structure their online identities with close correlation to their off-line ones. Again, this contrasts with other studies that stress the possibilities of identity play facilitated by anonymity. Baym speculates that this trend was due to both structural and communitarian reasons: The use of real names in r.a.t.s. is partially attributable to the systems used by these participants to read and write to the group. Most people access r.a.t.s. through work-related accounts that identify them using their real names. The preference for real names is normative as well as structural. Participants on r.a.t.s. actively discourage anonymity. Although some take on nicknames, most who use nicknames also promulgate their real names within the same messages. . . . In general, then, r.a.t.s. has an aversion to anonymity in identity construction, an aversion likely rooted in the demands of soap opera discussion. The use of real names helps to create a trusting environment in which the type of personal disclosure so important to collaborative soap interpretation can be voiced. (2000, 148)

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This linkage of trust to personal disclosure is thought provoking, as it is

evident in the context of the discussion of soap operas more generally being met with certain degree of scorn. Although the stigma of overinvestment in something perceived as trivial is common in most fan communities, it also leads to a greater degree of anonymity, or at least pseudonymized identity, especially in media fandom spaces concerned with the creation of fan works. It can be further hypothesized that the discouragement of anonymity in the soap opera forum also buttresses its homogenous—white, American, financially secure—nature. That is to say, the disclosure of personal identifying information would be much more highly fraught for those users who might think that this information would other them further in a demonstrably homogenous space. As I detail in the Introduction, for similar reasons, the ability to pass in online spaces has long been leveraged by both me and my respondents at various times within media fandom spaces.

Baym’s (2000) analysis mostly considers data collected in 1992, but she

revisits the newsgroup six years later, in 1998, after greater access to these spaces is granted thanks to the advent of multiple internet service providers (ISPs). The tensions in the group that arise with this broadening are documented as generational, with newer, younger users being seen as not attentive enough to community norms and established etiquette, and older users being accused of gatekeeping and cliquish behavior. Although not reflected in Baym’s analysis (the whiteness of these spaces is acknowledged at one point but is not explored further as constitutive of them), the mechanisms that work to maintain the status quo of such spaces, expressed in yearning for a better, more civilized time, are often coded as discomfort with the disruptive effect of racialized difference. I will explore the ramifications of this further in Chapter 2. For now, I direct my attention to how the default whiteness of cybercultural spaces has been perpetuated by the structuring of such academic analyses.

In contrast to Baym (2000), Clerc (1996) maintains that media fandom

activity in the same time period has a bias toward mailing lists as opposed to “high-profile Usenet newsgroups,” where interaction is less oriented toward generating status and more oriented toward communication. She notes, “Although some newsgroups manage to gain to attain a sense of community, mailing lists are more likely to do so because of the way they are set up. . . . Perhaps more importantly you have to come out of the fan closet to join a mailing list: you can’t pretend you are only casually interested in The X Files

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when there are fifty messages in your mailbox every morning” (221). When I interviewed one of my respondents about her move to online modes of fandom activity, she talked about first using Usenet newsgroups organized into hierarchies by subject—for example, sci.biology and sci.physcis are grouped under the same broad heading, sci. She recalls, I dated a computer programmer starting in 1989 (married him in 1991). By ’93, I accessed them through various “gateways.” And by the end of that year, I was accessing them directly. Fandom groups were EVERYWHERE, in both the rec.arts hierarchy, and the alt. hierarchy. Some were for discussion of the media (rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.startrek and spin-offs) some were for community—rec.arts.sf.fandom, for example. Others, usually in the alt.hierarchy, were for fanfiction—alt.startrek.creative, alt.startrek.creative.adult, among others. (Respondent 18, interview with author, 2014)

She also recollects the shift from newsgroups to mailing lists, and when

queried about the reason, she cites both convenience and security. She notes, “Mailing lists were more direct, and posting was easier, especially with the moderated groups. USENETs were vulnerable to trolls.” This experience mirrors Clerc’s (2015) analysis. When asked about her personal motivation to seek online modes of interaction, the respondent simply states, “I was not very tech savvy at first, but husband helped. Fandom was always on Usenet, you understand.” This last statement is crucial because it expresses the idea that the move and adaptation of media fandom to online modes of communication was a step taken with alacrity (at least its initial move) and that women, after getting over their hesitation with new technology, participated in newsgroups and then in mailing lists in large numbers.2

Similar trends can be seen in Rhiannon Bury’s A Cyberspace of Their Own:

Female Fandoms Online (2005), a study of two fandoms active the 1990s based around the television shows The X-Files (1993–2002) and Due South (1994–99). She also notes the use of mailing lists for fandom activity, drawing on Michel Foucault (1986) to posit that these spaces function as heterotopias. For Bury, these spaces are potentially radical in “their reworking of normative spatial practices and relations” (18), functioning as they do in uneasy negotiations with ideas of public/private divides in an online context. Bury does pay attention to axes of identity beyond gender, registering the operations of class, sexuality, and nationality within these communities, but she stops short of

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considering the role of racial identity. Finally, Francesca Coppa’s (2006a) history of media fandom also charts a whistle-stop tour across these narratives (as it has a lot of ground to cover), underlining the technical proficiency that fans exhibit in creating the infrastructure of media fandom spaces.

This scholarship stresses that it is the labor performed by women fans

to create and maintain these spaces within collaborative communitarian norms that promotes a sense of belonging. Particularly valued as a result are qualities that promote getting along, including politeness and nonconfrontational styles of communication around potential controversies. Early spaces certainly had their share of discord, but official histories have tended to gloss them over, perhaps in an effort to showcase successful woman-centric alternatives to a cyberspace otherwise dominated by male narratives. To return to Coppa’s (2006a) overview—a chronicle that has become a frequently cited resource—it must be noted that it (as has my analysis so far) focuses primarily on fandoms that formed around US and UK television shows. It is also a particularly intimate portrait of early online fandom activities, listing particularly important archive sites, mailing lists, and prominent fans that influenced these communities through the 1990s and early 2000s.

These documentations of early media fandom activity are important

because these contributions are often erased or forgotten. However, such documentation inevitably leads to some erasure of its own. For instance, although Coppa (2006a) registers the presence of fandoms that formed around Japanese anime and manga media texts, these are not given the same weight, possibly as a result of her unfamiliarity with them. Also, crucially, a differentiation is made between Western English-speaking fans and Japanese fans, completely eliding the presence of those participants who are diasporic, immigrants, or otherwise placed in between such identifications. The specific activities of fans past the point of the splintering of fan activity from large Western media–centric archives is also not examined in detail, possibly because such activities are perceived as less indicative of technical skill as interfaces became easier to navigate. Indeed, all considerations of specific fan labor in establishing these communities and facilitating their growth is not given any attention.

It is these histories that I now attempt to (re)insert into the dominant

narratives that I have detailed so far. My discussion draws on the various

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entry pathways recalled by my interviewees, highlighting the importance of manga and anime fandoms within the development of contemporary global media fandom rather than as the somewhat othered space they occupy in official histories. I also stress the importance of the fact that my interviews indicate that these fans have engaged in technical activities such as building fan sites themselves, as well as creating fan works at various times.

It is not my intention to elevate this kind of activity over other types

of fandom participation like lurking. Rather, I wish to point to the material ways in which nonwhite fans have contributed to these spaces. This tracing contributes to my overarching argument throughout this book: that nonwhite fans have been part of the infrastructure of fandom spaces from their inception. The erasure of this historical presence contributes to the idea that critiques of these spaces around axes of racial identity in particular (as evident in the The Force Awakens meta commentary referenced in the Introduction) are a new phenomenon. In the course of this book I also outline the reasons why these critiques are now gaining more visibility. Now, however, I wish to highlight the diversity that has always been present within fandom’s origin stories.

The consistent trend in theorization that positions the fangirl as a mar-

ginal identity leads to some problematic assumptions about the operations of privilege within media fan spaces. Stemming from Henry Jenkins’s (1992) foundational idea of the fan as poacher, this line of thought continues to make invisible the specific hierarchies at play within them to concentrate on their potential as spaces of subversive reclamations of texts by (largely undifferentiated) women fans. That is not to say conflict among them has not been a subject of discussion, but this has mainly been framed in terms of fans seeking legitimacy or in terms of a kind of respectability politics (Alters 2007; Zubernis and Larsen 2012; Stanfill 2013).

These analytical frames have left the marginal positioning of the fangirl

largely undisturbed. I am not arguing against the idea that female fans have historically been seen as hysterical, irrational, and unimportant to producers of popular cultural texts; nor am I arguing against the idea that media fandom spaces have functioned as alternative networks within male-dominated geek cultures. However, this line of theorization is increasingly leading to arguments that maintain that the very act of identifying as a fan somehow makes white cisgender women participants in these spaces less privileged

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on an institutional level, or less culpable for holding and perpetuating ideas rooted in racism. In light of these troubling narratives, I argue that it is necessary to reevaluate and expand historical documentations of these spaces.

Decolonizing Media Fandom History

To collect evidence of historical online media fandom activity is a

fraught task in any context, but it is particularly difficult once generalized accounts must be abandoned. Fandoms ebb and flow more quickly than they can be recorded, and what is considered a major hub of activity may be abandoned in a matter of months. Fan works as records are vulnerable to the feelings of individual creators, who may delete them, or to the vagaries of hosting sites, which may go out of business, be taken over by bigger corporations, or delete content. Moral panic and censorship have also been instrumental in erasing fan works that offend mainstream sensibilities, particularly around slash fan fiction (“Strikethrough and Boldthrough,” Fanlore .org). In this context, it is difficult to craft a single linear narrative of specifically nonwhite fan participation.

As I note in the Introduction, the default assumption of whiteness in

these spaces, though never made explicit, means that for the most part, fans who come from other racial, cultural, or ethnic backgrounds are hesitant to label or identify themselves in such ways. Further, because these identities are not monolithic and indeed are greatly inflected by individual fan experience, it is difficult to describe or analyze them without falling into the trap of essentializing discourses. Terms like “fan of color,” for instance, are not uncontested, particularly because media fandom is transnational and transcultural. I examine these contestations in more detail in Chapter 3, but now I wish to highlight certain moments in fandom history that inform their current deployment.

Generalized histories of fandom are crafted in part to show these spaces

as largely homogenous in terms of community norms and codes of interaction. As Bury (2005) stresses, “niceness” is a valued trait, and “abrasive” personalities who bring conflict into such spaces are generally considered troublemakers (67). Although there is a long history of conflict in those spaces around many issues, these are generally classified as wank—fan parlance for skirmishes that are seen to be motivated by petty concerns—and are mostly

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not included in academic analyses. There have been some exceptions to this; some scholars have considered communities dedicated to the chronicling of such conflicts as evidence of their self-reflexivity (Dunlap and Wolf 2010). As Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (2012) observe, “Fandom wank focused inward creates a constant interrogation of our own fannish practices and their broader implications” (141).

In the chronicling of these conflicts, a thread of sustained critique of

the treatment of nonwhite characters in popular cultural texts by fandom can be found. Taken individually, each of these discussions has arisen from specific circumstances or triggering events, each unique to a particular fan community. This is also how these events have so far been considered within fan studies—on the occasions they have been registered at all (Scodari 2012; Velazquez 2013). However, if identified as a pattern of critique, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that this is an issue that remains consistent across genres and generations of fan activity.

My overview here is therefore something of a jigsaw puzzle of fandom

controversies, and it is guilty of skipping across genres and platforms of fan activity. I maintain, however, that it is vital to piece together this puzzle, and that it functions as a conversation that by necessity occurs in fits and starts because it is only in these flashpoint situations when fandom spaces are asked to confront their privileges and biases in concrete ways. This inevitably leads to a regurgitation of the same arguments that come up as newer entrants into these spaces struggle to come to terms with them. To conceptualize these conversations as an historical legacy of critique on par with other histories of fandom such as those chronicling the progress of specific fan practices such as zine making, cosplay, and fan work itself, is to acknowledge that these flashpoints are not isolated, unique events but rather function as a powerful countercurrent to dominant theorizations about fan spaces.

For Te, a fan who has been active in fandom since the mid-1990s,

the default whiteness of online fannish spaces, starting from mailing lists onward, has always affected her navigation of them. As a prolific and wellknown fan writer who has also been routinely vocal about her specific background, she recounts her early experiences: Back in the nineties, it just wasn’t that weird for men of color to have each other on their chat buddy lists—mostly AOL back then—even when they

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were only tangentially involved in each other’s fandoms. And, you know, every once in a while, out of the blue, you’d get a message—

“TE! TE! I FOUND ANOTHER ONE!”



“HOLY SHIT WHERE? WHO?”



“HER NAME IS [X]! SHE’S FROM TRINIDAD! SHE LIKES VAMP-

CHRON AND WISEGUY! I THINK SHE LIVES NEAR TUCSON!”

“FUCK! I’VE HEARD OF BOTH OF THOSE FANDOMS! WE’RE LIKE

SISTERS!”

—and so on. (Te, interview with author, 2014)

This also carried over into off-line experiences with fannish events,

where her presence in these inclusive spaces was seen as an interruption to the norm even as she was routinely explicit about her racial identity: When I had a bit more disposable income—and a lot more physical health—I would go to conventions from time to time. I was always treated very well there, and there were never *overt* instances of racism/prejudice, but I lost count of the sheer number of times when people—obviously well-meaning people—would do this:

“Oh! *Oh*! *You’re* Te? *Really*? But I *never* imagined you’d be *Black*!”



Complete with double-take. And fluttery blinks. And hand-on-the-

bosom. And so on. AND SO ON.

AND. FUCKING. SO ON.



Sometimes? They would go ON.



“I always imagined you White! And small! And really rather Goth!”



You would not BELIEVE how many people said those words to me, in just

that way. At different cons, in different states. (Te, interview with author, 2014)

It is not difficult to see how this kind of reaction would be replicated

across fannish spaces, thus implicitly discouraging fans who already saw themselves as othered from speaking out about issues of race and racism within spaces that function, up to a point at least, as places of fannish synergy. In terms of her more public writing, Te also posted about the issue in her LiveJournal blog in 2006, discussing specifically the treatment of characters of color in juggernaut fandoms and the importance of the informal network of nonwhite fans she had managed to build:

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We knew who we were. We knew what we were doing, what we were writing, what we were watching. And, periodically, we would find each other. Just to—well, to bask in being of-color together. Is that disturbing? No, strike that, I don’t actually care if you find it disturbing. It’s the truth, and it was—*is*—necessary.

Because there’s a difference between *having* cool characters of color

and having *fannish* cool characters of color. There’s an objective difference—yes, even now, Virginia—between the way we as fans (*especially* slash fans) treat characters of color. Why, in some respects . . . In some respects, it’s as if these admittedly awesome characters of color simply aren’t on the same *shows*. Alternately, it’s as if these characters only exist on those parts of the show that we, as fans, are not capable of being fannish about.

This recognition—that even when media that fan writers gravitate

toward do have well-written nonwhite characters that fit fannish archetypes, these characters fail to gain the same traction in fannish spaces—continues to remain largely unacknowledged when popular character or pairing trends in fan work are discussed. It is a thread that I will pick up again in my specific analysis of media fandom’s structures in Chapters 4 and 5, but here I would like to highlight it as something that has been a sustained topic of debate in fan spaces but that nonetheless continues to remain footnoted in fan studies.

Te’s (2006) accounts also gesture to the ways in which there must be

enough points of recognition between nonwhite fans for notions of solidarity to begin to be expressed. This mirrors the narratives of the genesis of media fandom spaces in which women fans of the original Star Trek (1966– 69) find both community and validation when their activities are recorded and disseminated (“Reminisce with Me/Entering Star Trek Fandom,” Fanlore .org). The ways in which nonwhite fans have found lines of affinity between each other continue to be conflicted, yet the powerful effect of finding others like them within media fandom communities is clearly a key aspect of their experiences.

Te’s (2006) post prompted responses from some white fans who

claimed their reluctance to write nonwhite characters was underscored by an uncertainty about getting them right and inadvertently causing offense. This rhetorical tactic is not new to discussions around writing the other,

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as will be seen in the next controversy I track, but when articulated within media fan spaces, which see considerable and sustained intensity around deconstructing canonical character traits, motivations, emotions, and sexualities, it seems especially jarring. WitchWillow (2006), another nonwhite fan, articulates this frustration: I’ve been ranting all through this entry and I just realized what bothers me about this. That poster and everyone like her who doesn’t write characters of color—is crossing the street. If you’re someone of color you know what I’m talking about. You’re walking down the street and a white woman notices you, and clings to her purse a little tighter, or crosses the street. If you’re a black man you see it all the time, men and women who either suddenly get submissive or overly aggressive, just in body language, until you pass on by.

She crossed the street. She sits there and talks about knowing black

people and not being racist and having respect and not wanting to get things wrong. But she crossed the street. She made an assumption. A fear based assumption. She made the assumption that people of color would. hurt. her. She made the assumption that we are people to be scared of and that we need to be pacified and it’s easier not to engage at all. She’s part of a unique community, a group of people who share writing love and show love and character love, but despite all that—one of us, or a character from that show comes walking down the street and she grabbed her purse and crossed to the streetlight and hoped for the best.

I am offended. I’m hurt and offended and nothing is going to make that

go away.

What I’d like to highlight in both the noted responses is the specific-

ity of the arguments being advanced in them. WitchWillow and Te’s posted narratives record the hurt of them buying into what media fan spaces are overtly characterized as, both inside these communities and in the academic literature about them—progressive, inclusive, and subversive—and then realizing that those qualities remain reserved for only certain characters. This emotional reaction comes not from the perspective of outsiders but as longtime participants and contributors to these spaces. I stress this aspect because even ten years later, a startlingly similar line of reasoning is seen in the conversation around The Force Awakens, only this time people who do speak up against these patterns are framed as bullies who just want to seem

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progressive. The fact that the same arguments are being repeated ten years later indicates that this is an endemic problem.

These conversations continued to surface in sporadic bursts, but in

2009, a controversy now broadly referred to as RaceFail ’09 brought them to the forefront once again, this time including professional writers as well (“RaceFail ’09,” Fanlore.org). The flashpoint was a LiveJournal blog entry by popular SF/F author Elizabeth Bear on the subject of writing the other; she was lauded by her fans and peers for tackling the issue in a sensitive manner (Matociquala 2009). However, one fan, Avalon’s Willow (2009), responded slightly differently, taking off from Bear’s own novel, Blood and Iron (2006). Her “Open Letter to Elizabeth Bear” was a brutal juxtaposition of what Bear advocated in her post and how she had actually chosen to write the other in her work. Bear initially responded to Avalon’s Willow by accepting her critique, but soon some of Bear’s other fans and fellow authors jumped into the debate, implying that it was merely a failure to read correctly on the part of Avalon’s Willow and other critics. This is of course a familiar rhetorical tactic used to suppress such critique. The subsequent heated exchanges prompted hundreds of posts by fans of color and allies, as well as by those who were resistant to the ideas put forth by them. The latter also included a discouragingly large number of professional SF/F writers and publishers (A. Somerville 2009).

RaceFail ’09 was important for a number of reasons, but in terms of my

argument, it is significant because it marked the first time in online fandom’s history when SF/F’s racist and imperialist characterizations were debated in a forum where authors and editors of SF/F magazines and journals had to engage with those questions, and the first time that alliances between nonwhite fans were made across forums and platforms. The particular aspects of these interactions that were sparked by the controversy are also reflected in other discussions of the event. As N. K. Jemisin, a Black writer whose first book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published in 2010, reflects, I feel more comfortable being myself now than ever before, after more than 20 years as a fan and aspiring writer in this field. Used to be I was the only brown face in the room at most SFF events and gatherings; used to be even I thought this was normal, and that I was some kind of rarity—even though practically every other person of color I know, including family and significant others, was a fan of SFF in some form. (One of the most powerful moments

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for me in RaceFail was when the participating fans of color decided to do a very informal roll call, and illustrated just how non-rare we were.) Used to be I ground my teeth but kept silent when hearing fellow fans say asinine, bigoted things, because the whole room seemed to agree with them and I didn’t feel safe or brave enough to raise an objection. (Jemisin 2010)

I wish to highlight the sense of community that Jemisin and other non-

white fans found during the controversy. The roll call she references was in a sense a validation of identity and of presence in these spaces, where once again presumed whiteness had operated so powerfully as to lead Jemisin to dismiss all evidence to the contrary. RaceFail ’09 is a watershed moment in discussions of race in fannish spaces because it broke a silence around the topic and established networks that would also influence discussions in the future (Klink 2010).

RaceFail ’09 also had an effect on my own interviewees, which I will

trace in context of my arguments about fandom as a specifically postcolonial cyberspace as it has moved toward more dialogic platforms. But here I wish to contextualize it historically as another moment where media fandom spaces were forced to confront their erasures. In doing so, it also provided an opportunity for nonwhite fans to find points of coalition building, and perhaps a corroboration that their concerns were shared by others and were as valid as other social issues that seemed to concern these woman-dominated online spaces. I will pick up on some specific historically situated conversations about race in fan fiction in Chapters 4 and 5, but at this stage, I’d now like to trace some of the other pathways that nonwhite fans have taken into fan spaces so as not to construct them as always only in an othered space, because that wrongly elevates a singular narrative about their activities.

Highlighting Diversity in Fandom Infrastructure

While interviewing my respondents, one of my first questions was

about how they discovered online fandom and how their first navigations of these spaces proceeded. I did this in order to contextualize their responses because I was interviewing fans of various ages from various different geographical areas, and I was curious as to see what patterns, if any, came up in terms of first fandoms. It was also to discover what kinds of activities these fans engaged in, and whether members primarily lurked (as I did) or

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participated directly. Of my thirty-nine respondents, twenty-five gave me specific details about their age when they first discovered these spaces, and they also named the fandoms they participated in. The range of discovery of fandom for these participants falls into the historical time period that I have concentrated on so far, from 1995 to 2006. Additionally, while Baym (2000), Bury (2005), and Coppa (2006a) generally describe slightly older women, especially regarding those participants who were contributing to the infrastructure of fandom, my respondents’ mean age at entering this space was fifteen, with the oldest ones being in their thirties and the youngest one being nine years old. When looking at how teenage use of internet technologies was being theorized within the nascent field of cybercultural studies in that same period, I found that it generally focused on panic about the effects of the internet on young minds. Issues being considered included internet addiction, a skewed use of these spaces in terms of gender, and the vulnerability of young users to predatory behavior by strangers (Young 1998; La Ferle, Edwards, and Lee 2000; Burgess-Proctor, Patchin, and Hinduja 2009).

The first examinations of specifically racialized encounters for adoles-

cents with internet-based media would only come with danah boyd’s (2011) important study on white flight to Facebook from MySpace, with each space described by participants in highly racially coded language. In this context, it is vital to examine what nonwhite participants were doing with the time and resources that were available to them at a point when the availability of internet connectivity was still somewhat of a luxury. As one respondent recalls, “Back then it was modems and I got into trouble for tying up the phone line, so I would sneak on at night (2–3 am) and save the pages of as much fic as I could so I could read it in my own time!” (Respondent 17, interview with author, 2014). Another respondent recounts, My first experience with fandom was when I was in elementary school, and my brother brought home Final Fantasy 8 games to play. I’d watch him play, but since he was in college, he was only home for the weekends, so I was usually left hanging with where the story was going to go. I did have access to the internet, so I searched for Final Fantasy 8 and stumbled onto fanfiction (mostly slash).

I read it and was super confused (hadn’t had sex ed yet, didn’t know gay

people existed or what the word meant exactly), but I found I really enjoyed reading fanfiction. I eventually stumbled onto fanfiction.net and basically

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went there any time there was a new show or game I was interested in to see if there was fanfiction. (Respondent 6, interview with author, 2014)

This is not a unique story within media fandom discovery narratives;

many studies recount how explicit fan fiction of all genres has been part of many young women’s exploration of their own identities (Black 2008; Tosenberger 2008a; Day 2014). It is, however, indicative of a diversity of participants within that narrative that has largely gone unexamined. Additionally, many skills required to navigate these spaces appear to have been selftaught, both in terms of issues of privacy and of technical knowledge that enabled fans to build fan sites. When I went through responses, I was struck by the number of respondents who casually mentioned making individual websites; this kind of activity is invariably seen as the domain of either male users of the internet or, in terms of media fandom spaces, as those set up by white women fans.

For instance, a fan identifying as Bangladeshi-Malaysian, who has

moved between multiple locations, chronicles her beginnings with music fandom, specifically the bands Aqua and Savage Garden: So I started with Aqua, making a fan website for them in 1998. It might have been one of their first. I then got into Savage Garden fandom that same year, which has a rich fanfiction culture, and became the most prolific Savage Garden fanfic writer in the fandom.

The official BBS [bulletin board site] had a fanfic sub-forum, so I was

often on those BBSes while also talking to other fans on the various websites and sub-forums and newsletters and such. I even participated in a number of large fandom projects, including care packages and a World Record-breaking attempt to translate Crash and Burn in as many languages as possible.

Along the way, if I really liked a media object, I would make a fansite for

it. TV shows, radio shows, that sorta thing.

That was a lot of Livejournal posts and fanfic and regular chatting on

AIM with a bunch of queer fans roughly my age mostly from the US. (Located in Malaysia at the time) (Creatrix Tiara, interview with author, 2014)

Another respondent who discovered fan fiction through professional

wrestling fandom recalls, “I’ve always been comfortable writing so it didn’t

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take long to move on to writing and posting to fiction message boards. I built a little Geocities fansite—totally taught myself HTML. Then I started up a fiction archive and nurtured it into a fairly big fandom resource. The site ran for five+ years” (Respondent 12, interview with author, 2014). And again, this time in the context of Japanese anime fandoms, a participant discloses, I was pretty young but was very enthusiastic over them; for Akazukin Cha I wrote a lot of fic and became one of the more well-known authors in the fandom, and for Ruoroni Kenshin I read a lot of fic and wrote a few (fic-writing was more intimidating here, as it attracted a more mature audience and there were so many good writers in the fandom).

For both, I set up fansites and bought a lot of merchandise.3 (Respon-

dent 13, interview with author, 2014)

These anecdotes paint a picture of active adolescents who were engag-

ing with media fan communities and contributing to their infrastructure in material ways, becoming well known and prolific fan creators, creating archive sites, and networking with young fans in other countries. This is a vital part of the story of media fan communities that often gets glossed over, as they are constructed primarily around Western English-language media texts that go on to assume a homogenous fan base, particularly before the advent of international streaming services that have now caused a shift in terms of conceptualizing audiences. In such narratives, as I have already pointed out, the role of cross-cultural media texts like that of manga and anime are given less attention. It is to these that I now turn my focus.

Anime and Manga Fandoms as Cross-Cultural Pathways to Media Fandom

My emphasis in this section is a result of my interviewees repeatedly

bringing up both manga and anime as formative in their discovery of media fandom spaces. While it is not within the scope of this chapter to give an exhaustive account of manga and anime fandoms, I wish to pick up a particular trajectory of their development that has not been explored adequately so far in scholarship that has focused on these genres or in more general media fandom studies. The repeated emphasis on such texts as first

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fandoms for my respondents can certainly partly be traced to the anime boom that caught the attention of schoolgoing adolescents in the United States during the 1990s. However, it also clearly functioned as a particular pathway for many nonwhite fans, through both internet-mediated platforms and English-language media fandom spaces.

In broader popular cultural studies, the popularity of these texts with a

US audience has been theorized mainly in terms of their attraction to readers who were largely assumed to be white. When other identities have been considered, these are still subsumed under a dominant US-centric identification. In one influential analysis, Annalee Newitz (1994) postulates that “when Americans are anime otaku . . . as much as they may dislike or avoid American culture—and even if they are from Asian racial backgrounds— they are still Americans, and they are rejecting their national culture in favor of another national culture” (10–11). I strongly disagree with this assessment of the relationship that Asian Americans have to anime and manga texts, especially because these texts were not sourced from only Japan at the time, with respondents referring to Chinese and Korean texts as well. However, Japanese texts have received the most attention in academia. The popularity of these texts has been theorized in terms of their exoticness, in terms of their depiction of Japan as a highly futuristic landscape that David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995) term techno-orientalism, and in terms of the role that US and UK SF/F texts play in using Japanese iconography to signify a desirable otherness (Clements 1995). Similarly, their lack of overt markers of Japaneseness has been seen to facilitate their crossover appeal (Newitz 1994; Allison 2000; Napier 2000). This line of thought—that anime and manga texts are somehow unmarked by race—continues to have repercussions, including in the controversial casting of Scarlett Johansson in the 2017 Hollywood live-action adaptation of the iconic Japanese anime series, Ghost in the Shell. As Emily Yoshida (2016) reflects, for Japanese Americans, the relationship to anime and manga texts is decidedly not the same experience that Newitz proposes: For us, anime is something from our country, or our parents’ country, that was cool enough for white kids to get into just as fervently. We couldn’t see ourselves in Hollywood’s shows and movies, but we could claim anime as our own, and see ourselves in its wild sci-fi imaginings and cathartic transformation sequences. Of course, I use the words “see ourselves” loosely.

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I was born in Japan, but raised by my Caucasian mother in America. She

had an appreciation for Japanese art and culture, and raised me on some very basic Japanese. But I remember her looking askance at anime, especially as it started to rise in popularity in the states in the early ’90s. “Those big eyes? That crazy hair? They don’t look Japanese at all!” (Of course, the average anime character does look unmistakably Japanese, but in the same way a rococo painting in a gilded frame looks unmistakably French.)

I knew I was supposed to be suspicious of anime, but as I grew into ado-

lescence I found myself almost involuntarily drawn toward it. Not only did it have the seductive qualities of the forbidden, the lurid, the trashy—it was also one of the only pop cultural connections I had to a culture I had largely been severed from at birth.

It is not my intention here to focus on the contentious racialized visual

aspect of these texts but rather to establish that they were important to young media fans in my study in distinctly different ways than what has been privileged in scholarship thus far. In many cases these texts provided a touchstone to home cultures but also served as a base on which to build friendships and broader fan communities. The ways in which these communities took shape and mediated the experience of a fair number of media fandom participants has remained footnoted in most generalized overviews. This has been a mistake: it is in their functioning that more specific information about the roots of contemporary fandom can be found. For instance, the complex relationship diaspora subjects have with popular cultural texts from their home countries has been the subject of much analysis in terms of postcolonial critiques of Bollywood (Gopinath 2000; Bhattacharya 2004; Punathambekar 2005; Rao 2007). It is this space of liminality, of inbetween-ness, that I will build on in order to argue for media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace.

One of the ways to trace the specific activities of nonwhite fans, like

my respondents, in these spaces is to focus on the practice of scanlation— that is, the process whereby manga texts are made available in English for free to fans who do not speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. The neologism gestures to an informal yet complex system in which manga comics would be purchased by fans residing in the country of their origin, then scanned, uploaded, translated, reedited, and hosted by groups of fans who had formed a group for that express purpose. The related practice of fan subbing

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made anime films available with English subtitles, although obtaining or watching these subtitled texts required greater bandwidth than was easily available in the time period that is my focus.

Scanlation was a key mechanism that facilitated the popularity of

manga, particularly because it bridged the gap between demand for these texts and the slow pace and unpredictability of official translations. The first projects began as early as 1996, with the manga Ranma ½ being translated, but the practice gained steam between 1999 and 2001 (Rampant 2010). These fan groups generally used internet relay chat (IRC) platforms to disseminate their projects to maximize limited bandwidth, and in many cases the fan groups evolved to become highly efficient and prolific. Eventually splinter groups formed catering to specific genres of manga, and aggregator sites sprang up that hosted multiple projects from a variety of sources.4

Scanlation practices have so far been examined in terms of ethical

considerations, privacy concerns, and the relationship between fans and producers in light of more stringent copyright laws and manga publishers cracking down to a greater extent on such activity (H. K. Lee 2009; Liaw 2011; Manovich, Douglass, and Huber 2011). These are mostly generalized overviews, however, and it is surprisingly difficult to find actual demographic data for these groups. This can partly be traced to the use of online pseudonyms and perhaps researchers being careful to protect the identities of fans who could be seen to be engaging in illegal activity. It is also the result of rapid turnover of staff within groups that lacked interest in standardized record keeping.

One archival-cum-historical project is the Inside Scanlation website

(http://www.insidescanlation.com/), which incorporates interviews with project heads as well as profiles of groups that gained prominence; however, once again, there is little mention of specific identities. However, in line with my own interviews and broader trends in the availability of genres, it can be theorized that a large number of young women were involved in these practices. It can also be speculated that while there were certainly some participants involved who had no personal connections to the specific cultural contexts of these texts but knew enough Japanese, Chinese, and Korean to source the scans and translate them, there was also a significant number of participants from those specific national, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

The profile of one group on Inside Scanlation, called Shoujo Magic,

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provides some clues. The description of the group stresses that it was a successful one, created in 2002 by a young girl known as chry18 who initially scanned and uploaded manga pages for a friend who hadn’t managed to finish a manga before she “returned to Australia.” Although it is not made clear where the friend was leaving from, it seems probable that this was Japan, considering that chry18 at first only uploaded scans of Japanese manga without translating them. In the process, chry18 met another like-minded manga lover, Siana, and the group was born. Shoujo Magic would grow into a prolific scanlation group active between 2002 and 2009. Its popularity is seen to be the result of high-quality work as well as the choice of texts: “Although manga translations and scanlations had been around many years before ShoujoMagic, most manga available online were shounen series like Dragonball, Ranma ½, and Love Hina. Shoujo series were sparse and elusive, and only a few groups, such as Certhy and MangaArt, scanlated shoujo manga at all. ShoujoMagic was the first major group to cater to women and became a smash hit in the budding scanlation scene” (“ShoujoMagic: Inside Scanlation,” http://www.insidescanlation.com/). This focus on genres that catered to women readers also encapsulated those of yaoi or boys’ love (BL), which featured erotic and romantic relationships between male characters. It is curious that although the cross-cultural popularity of yaoi has attracted some attention, the actual process whereby these texts were made available to women readers, which necessitated collaborative practices such as scanlation, has not been adequately addressed.

For instance, when Mark McLelland (2009) examines both Japanese-

and English-language websites that feature explicit yaoi material, his focus is on the implications of the circulation of such material in terms of the legal status of pornography in different cultural contexts. Although he notes some differences in terms of how the English-language sites position their enjoyment of the genre, this difference is purely one of language rather than one of identity. However, as I have maintained, for many of my respondents, anime and manga (including a lot of yaoi) was their entry into media fandom spaces. Further, their participation in these specific internet-mediated spaces affected them in specific ways. The implications of such activity, in the context of an academic discourse that even today sees it as a sphere dominated by male-centered scanlation groups, are thus even more significant.

One respondent (a Chinese American fan) buttresses this hypothesis in

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her detailing of her experiences of participating in scanlation groups from 2002 to 2005. She observes that the projects that focused on the genres of yaoi or BL were predominantly led by women. I quote her recollections in detail because she covers many of the issues that I wish to highlight: I was into anime and manga from a young age, having been exposed to it by cousins etc., but it took searching for Sailor Moon on the Internet back in the mid 90’s to realize there was a thing called fandom. I read a lot of terrible fic, often crossed over with a billion other series I didn’t know much about, made a fan site that I’m sure no one ever visited, etc.

I can’t really remember a reaction to it because it felt natural to read fic

for whatever reason, but did I ever get a shock when I innocently opened a Ranma ½ fic and it ended up being a m/m/m fic! And that is how I discovered slash (though I grew up calling it yaoi or bl and only switched over to slash after moving into western fandoms).

I dabbled in translating manga for MangaProject, if you remember that!

I loved that site—it took me 20+ minutes to download a single scanlated chapter, but somehow my sister and I read entire 30 volume series that way. Chinese translations were always available way earlier than the scanlated ones, so I’d download them from IRC and use those to translate. I translated some Slamdunk, Hanakimi, Gokusen, Antique Bakery etc., mostly because I just needed other people to fangirl with me! This spanned high school and college for me. (Respondent 9, interview with author, 2014)

For this fan, the need for sharing and building fan interest around par-

ticular texts that were meaningful to her led to participation in cybercultural spaces that drew on her particular identity. It is also noteworthy that the language of media fandom for her has also remained enmeshed in code switching that depends on the frame of the discussion. The importance of code switching in fandom, whereby multilingual fans simultaneously access and participate in multiple fan spaces, has so far not been given much consideration in fan studies. For instance, within the discipline, the category of transnational fan studies often implies a demarcation by language use—K-pop or Bollywood movies, for example. The possibility of fans simultaneously participating in both English-language spaces and these othered fandoms has remained unrecognized. In the fan’s aforementioned remarks, she recounts

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reading queer m/m fan fiction in manga fandoms and classifying it as yaoi, then switching to the term “slash” when participating in “western fandoms.” The fan is able to switch between fan spaces that have been presumed to be segregated both linguistically and culturally.

This was not a particularly isolated phenomenon, as I found when I

asked her to discuss the demographics of the scanlation groups she was involved with and whether there were any patterns about which manga titles were taken up by her fellow fans in terms of gender and racial, cultural, and ethnic background. She observes, I felt like there were a decent number of people who had just taken a bunch of Japanese [lessons], also a lot of Asia-based people.

I translated some stuff for the Manga Project whose founder was male,

I think. But I mostly did shoujo/bl so that were all women (as far as I knew).

In terms of specifically Chinese-language manga translation, she

recalls, “If it was translating from Chinese, pretty much everyone I can recall was ethnic Chinese. Maybe they were from Taiwan or Singapore or Chinese American, but still” (Respondent 9, interview with author, 2014). While it is not within the scope of this chapter to embark on a detailed analysis of the scanlation scene, I wish to highlight the fact that these spaces were heterogeneous in their composition.

At a time when adolescent use of the internet was continually framed

in terms of obsession, addiction, and predatory behavior, and when young women in particular were seen to be vulnerable in such environments, it is notable that this space saw cross-cultural collaboration and highly skilled use of language, translation, and graphics, as well as website and web chat administration. Further, these fannish spaces allowed for explorations around various axes of identity, in addition to gender and sexuality, that my respondents were significantly shaped by. It is perhaps also telling that while fan work produced around English-language media texts produced in the United States and the United Kingdom has been consistently examined around their mobilizations of gender and sexuality, fan work produced by fans located in those same geographical locations around anime and manga texts has been framed in terms of the implications for literacy (ChandlerOlcott and Mahar 2003; Black 2005, 2008).

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Conclusion

It is clear then that even where the narratives of specifically racialized

experiences of media fandom communities could have been the focus of fandom histories, they remain othered and left out of the ambit of what fandom is generally recognized to constitute. Through my archival and anecdotal reconstruction, I have demonstrated that the assumed whiteness of media fandom spaces can only remain stable when this assumption is repeatedly shored up through making invisible and erasing both specific criticisms of and contributions to these spaces by nonwhite fans. Although the theoretical frameworks that influenced the early conceptualizations of cybercultural fandom spaces certainly encouraged such tendencies, they cannot be held solely to blame for researchers’ own blind spots in these areas. The structuring force of whiteness in such default modes of analysis has constructed these spaces as both homogenous in their makeup and uncomplicatedly progressive and uninflected by issues such as racism.

Finally, a consideration of such aspects in fan work does not only become

salient when talking about fandom’s specific treatment of nonwhite characters—though that certainly brings these issues to the fore. Rather, it must be taken as a constitutive element in our theorizations of all aspects of media fandom culture, be they histories (both in terms of absence or presence), contemporary operations of these communities, or conceptualizations of pleasure within fan work. I now build on this historical evidence to propose more broad-based theoretical models that will encourage inclusive frameworks. I next turn to contemporary media fandom communities as an example of postcolonial cyberspaces.

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2

As I have already demonstrated, trends in early studies into cybercultural communities such as fandom enabled researchers to gloss over the differential implications for nonwhite and non-Western identities when analyzing the operations of internet-mediated platforms. However, as knowledge about how such axes of identity are articulated in these spaces has grown, an expansion of these frameworks is required incorporating more inclusive theoretical apparatuses. It is undeniable that this is an extremely complex area of research, with intersections of gender and sexuality interacting with shifting and slippery notions of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national identities. However, it is equally undeniable that some of the most intriguing innovations and interactions that are unfolding in online forums at the moment are happening around these very loci.

For instance, phenomena like #BlackTwitter demonstrate how online

dialogic and discursive communities can and do form around diverse articulations of individual identity to impactful political and personal effects. #BlackTwitter has come to designate a loosely structured, US-centric discursive community on the microblogging platform Twitter that facilitates digitally networked discussion on topics as diverse as police brutality, electoral issues, and Beyoncé’s 2016 hit album Lemonade from a specifically Black and nonmainstream viewpoint (Brock 2012; Sharma 2012; Florini 2014). Black users leverage Twitter’s hashtags as organizational and filtering devices to enter into a public conversation around a particular topic. As Sarah Florini (2014) points out, these users construct their identities linguistically and

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perfomatively and so are flexible in their individual articulations even as they base them on a racialized identifier. As a politicized discursive community, #BlackTwitter does not collapse these identities into an essentialist monolith. These formulations function in complex ways that often make visible the inherently problematic nature of codifying diverse racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, and national identities under such an umbrella term, yet they also show how certain affinities and solidarities can be constructed across these boundaries. Although it is difficult for researchers dealing with these spaces to encapsulate such a diversity of engagements, with the help of theoretical frameworks that require consideration of multiple aspects of identity, more nuanced analyses are indeed possible.

This is also my approach to contemporary online media fandom com-

munities, which are now more than ever having to deal with discussions of these issues. These are also complex interactions to theorize, as constructs of global media texts interact with localized issues (not just in terms of geography but also community groupings) in ways that cannot be parsed simplistically. At any given moment on my Tumblr dashboard, fans are engaged in interrogating their own biases, arguing about notions of representation, finding new ways of engaging with source texts, and organizing around certain social justice issues. What is key to my discussions of these engagements is the recognition that they are happening within the act of squeeing over the latest Marvel movie. To try and posit these as somehow entirely separate spheres of fan activity, as some theorists have done when talking about notions of fan activism (which I will interrogate in Chapter 3), is to miss the interlinked rhetorical strategies that position these spaces as progressive while also eliding consistent patterns of erasure.

Theorizing Online Identity Today

Conceptualizations of online identity today have shifted more in terms

of platform than broader orientation. Early cyberfeminist theorists in many ways predicted the social turn in the use of internet-mediated platforms (Haraway 1991; Stone 1996; Wajcman 2007). With the advent of social media in particular, this has become the primary mode of theorization about both what individuals do online and by extension what they are in terms of their curated online identities. Scholars are currently examining these activities in myriad ways, spanning a wide range of issues, including microcelebrity

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practices where individuals leverage their online personas to sell everything from baby products to cars; social movements; and concerns about online privacy (Senft 2008; MacDonald 2013; Marwick 2013).

Manuel Castells’s (2009) influential theorization of this turn, the contem-

porary moment as the age of mass self-communication, underlines the ways in which cybercultural networks order global informational flows as part of what he calls today’s global network society. While cautioning against utopian framings of the functioning of such a society, Castells argues that power relationships have been “decisively transformed in the new organizational and technological context derived from the rise of global digital networks of communication” (4). Castells frames his arguments in the context of contemporary large-scale social movements that have succeeded in attracting attention within global informational networks such as Twitter through the use of hashtags and other such strategies. For him, the key question governing the success of such movements lies in how to reach “the global from the local, through networking with other localities—how to ‘grassroot’ the space of flows” (52).

This process is of course implicated in the question of how these infor-

mational flows are organized and controlled by a nexus of both corporate and national interests. To explicate the main problematics of this formulation, I will briefly consider the case of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. The campaign started in April 2014, when 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by the militant organization Boko Haram from their school in the town of Chibok. The campaign went viral and was successful in capturing the attention of the world. It also gained some high-profile backers such as Malala Yousafzai and Michelle Obama, who posed with signboards bearing the hashtag to signal their solidarity.

However, despite such attention, the campaign quickly passed from

public memory. Two years later, many of the girls are still missing, and few of the approximately 6.1 million people who engaged with the controversy online have followed up on the issue. This has been read as an example of slacktivism, in which people superficially express their interest in a social justice issue before moving on to another one (Morozov 2009; Christensen 2011). However, a large part of the attention that the event received was inflected by racism, Islamophobia, and imperialism (Chiluwa and Ifukor 2015; Maxfield 2015). The framing of the hashtag, putting emphasis on an empathetic connection to the plight of the schoolgirls and a possibly global

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feminist solidarity, remained largely unfulfilled in the face of the operations of these other interstices of identity. These operations must also be seen in relation to the strategies of Western governments in particular, who often use humanitarian issues to justify their military interventions in pursuit of decidedly nonhumanitarian ends in developing economies (Gibbs 1997; Arat-Koc 2002; Cairo 2006). This aspect of cybercultural theorization also has a direct relationship to fan studies, which I will examine in more detail in my discussion of fan activism in Chapter 3. Here, however, I would like to emphasize that such interactions are never uninflected by identities around issues of race, gender, religion, or nationality.

The controversy that unfolded also shows how particular cybercultural

spaces function as both platforms and interpretative frames that cannot be called anything other than global, with all the fraught connotations of that term. It encompasses the workings of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and neoimperialism as well as utopian ideas of cosmopolitanism and international solidarity. The competing imperatives that shape cybercultural studies today are thus often a matter of whether these terrains are theorized as functioning as uneven mediating influences on interactions within them or as relatively smooth conduits for the same. Although Castells’s theorizations call attention to the ways in which cybercultural terrains are increasingly sites of governmental regulatory interventions, his optimism about the potential transformative effect of these networks on power relations is rooted in a belief in their innovative newness. When viewed through the lens of postcolonial studies, however, these new networks continue to be ordered by historically rooted global power structures oriented by the forces of neocolonization in the interests of the Global North, even in cases where their humanitarian potentiality is foregrounded.

M. I. Franklin’s (2006) analysis of the internet-mediated interactions of

individuals hailing from the region of the South Pacific islands offers a useful theoretical framework to consider these complex and competing influences. Drawing attention to the materiality of cyberspace, she observes that access to these networks to ordinary users is now firmly in the hands of multinational corporations. She also points out that technological networks that are hailed as entirely new and revolutionary communicative innovations in fact “overlay older ones put in place by the British Empire a hundred years ago and then developed by post–World War II military-based satellite communications. The ensuing skewing in ‘global’ coverage continues today” (23).

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This intermingling of corporate and national imperialism has also been identified as a new form of empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001). Their identification of global multinational conglomerates as the new imperial nodes of power is particularly relevant to my critique.

In addition to this structural bias, I also question the impulse to identify

the use of digital spaces and tools (social media in particular) as the single most important common denominator across different protest movements, such as the Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong (Shirky 2008; Joyce 2010; Castells 2010; Skinner 2011; Juris 2012). Although I agree with the broad consensus that the internet has enabled the creation of alternative public spheres, there is also a danger of this celebratory discourse eliding persistent, crucial power differentials.

Algorithms of Cybercultural Identity

In this context, it is useful to look at interventions in cybercultural stud-

ies that highlight these dangerous erasures. One of the most significant is Chéla Sandoval’s 1994 essay, “Re-entering Cyberspace,” which problematizes Donna Haraway’s (1991) foundational conceptualization of the cyborg. Sandoval argues, radically for the time, that it is not the advent of the digital that would result in revolutionary outcomes but rather the use of those technologies from specific perspectives. For Sandoval, the identity of Haraway’s cyborg is always already gendered and raced, and must be engaged with a transnational (cyber)space that continues to be structured by those dynamics.

Unfortunately, Sandoval’s intervention failed to be taken into account

adequately by later scholars. Martha Nell Smith (2007) recalls that humanities computing conferences in the 1990s were largely silent on issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class, noting, “It was as if these matters of objective and hard science provided an oasis for folks who do not want to clutter sharp, disciplined, methodical philosophy with considerations of the gender-, raceand class-determined facts of life” (4). In addition to scholars who wanted to retreat from the “clutter” of identity articulation, there were those who instead fell into oppositional modes of theorization, arguing either for the internet as a utopian construct, free from institutional prejudice (Benedikt 1991; Rheingold 1993), or those who saw this notion as pure escapism (Robins and Webster 1999). This splitting of the virtual and real worlds by both those

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who saw the internet and associated technologies as emancipatory forces and those who saw them as coercive ones persists in a number of ways. As Lisa Nakamura (2002) points out, this makes for annoyingly split analyses that go too far in either direction. She argues, “Rather than adopting a utopian or pessimistic view in which the internet is viewed as either a vector for progressive change in the classical liberal tradition or as the purveyor of crude and simplistic ‘stereotypical cultural narratives,’ it seems crucial to first narrow the focus a bit and examine the specific means by which identities are deployed in cyberspace” (xiii). Nakamura’s emphasis on the “specific means by which identities are deployed in cyberspace” points the way forward and is highly influential in my own work. Academic theorization about what it means to be nonwhite and non-Western on the internet is (thankfully) more varied than when Nakamura dryly noted that she need not have rushed out her first book on the subject in 2002 because she feared that someone might preempt it. However, certain trends persist within this body of work—the othering of such activity outside the United States, a persistence of national identity as primary identifier—that I will now trace in order to position my case for postcolonial cybercultural frameworks to be adopted when examining transnational and transcultural online communities.

First, there is a distinct bias toward research located in the United

States. To name just a few studies, danah boyd (2011) researches the ghettoization of MySpace and the white flight to Facebook; Lynette Kvasny and C. Frank Igwe (2008) examine African American blogging around HIV/AIDS in the Black community; and L. Karlsson (2006) explores identity formation in Asian American blogs. As Jessie Daniels (2012) notes in a review of the field, there has been a consensus formed such that “people use the Internet to both form and reaffirm individual racial identity and seek out communities based on race and racial understandings of the world. . . . Castells notes that there is a constant struggle between globalization and identity. . . . This tension plays out in the global connectedness the web facilitates, which simultaneously scaffolds identity and community within and among multiple diasporas” (698). Although there is no doubt that this consensus is accurate, it tends to focus on particular diasporic groups and formulations of identity, thus inadvertently restricting the analysis of how racial, cultural, and ethnic identity is formulated online to particular forums and is confined to intracommunity interactions. To reference just a few studies, E. N. Ignacio’s

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(2006) study of Filipino diasporas draws from conversations on the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.filipino, while R. Mitra and R. Gajjala’s (2008) source is soc.culture.indian, illustrating their particular survey areas. I have already referenced Franklin’s (2006) work on diasporas drawing on the region of the South Pacific islands. Even when not working on diasporic online communities, researchers have tended to remain anchored to nationality as a primary identity marker and to geographical limitations in their studies (A. Fung 2006; Abidin 2013). This is perhaps a natural outcome of time and access being in short supply for such research, but does leave certain gaps.

One of these gaps is the understanding that even when individuals

engage in online activities that do not have anything to do with their racial, cultural, and ethnic identity, they have to continue to negotiate with that identity in some way, whether by omission or commission. The neutral internet user is still presumed to be straight, white, and male, as well as located in the Global North, and any deviation from that is marked off as a niche to be considered in a specific section of edited anthologies. For instance, it is highly unlikely that the users studied in the two Usenet studies I reference did not engage with other newsgroups according to their interests in video games or films or television—perhaps even in the newsgroups that formed my focus in Chapter 1 and that were studied by Baym (2000) and Bury (2005). However, in those neutral spaces, it is assumed that the other aspects of their identity are subsumed. Although individuals often use the internet to seek out “communities based on race and racial understandings of the world” (Daniels 2012, 698), they do not just switch off that understanding when it comes to other aspects of their online identities. What differs is their willingness to mark themselves off in those neutral spaces, as this usually brings a higher degree of visibility and differential treatment by other users.

The question seems almost too vast to comprehend. How can we talk

about the roles that racial, cultural, and ethnic identity play in structuring power relations and dialogue in a cybercultural and transnational context? This question clearly has different answers in different contexts, but it is necessary to seek them out. Most importantly, it is vital for all internet community researchers, no matter their object of study—be they mommy bloggers or Reddit forums—to make explicit the multiple aspects of their respondents’ identity so that no research can fall back on the rhetorical strategy of assuming a default. It is also vital that researchers discuss these categories as

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markers of identity without falling into the trap of essentialism—that is, of ignoring the complex lived relations that each individual experiences vis-àvis that person’s specific ethnic, cultural, and racial context.

Part of the answer to these questions lies in finding theoretical models

that encompass this complexity. Postcolonial cybercultural theory is uniquely positioned to engage with these multiple challenges as a theoretical paradigm that has always had to grapple with the dualistic nature of the internet. Although historically used in cultural and literary studies, postcolonial perspectives in theorizing aspects of cyberculture are vital in order to center its embedded inequalities. Postcolonial digital theory has had to balance the liberatory potential of the internet with the reality of it being inextricably linked to (neo)colonialism and (neo)imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, language use, and technology that functions within global networks to retain the status quo in favor of the Global North. That this field remains inadequately explored is simultaneously surprising and unsurprising. Although the convergence between postcolonial studies and cybercultural studies should have been an inevitable one, especially for scholars interested in identity and community, as a result of the inherent biases in both fields, there is still a significant gap in terms of postcolonial work in areas like the digital humanities. When Tara McPherson asks, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” (2012), she highlights how considerations of specific identities continue to disturb uncomplicated notions of a democratized cyberspace.

The challenge has since been taken up with scholars from postcolonial

backgrounds interrogating these very concerns, particularly around the axes of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, by organizing digital workshopping discussions like #TransformDH and #DHPoco (Cong-Huyen 2013). These theorists have also made significant critiques of the high level of privilege necessary for the effects of these issues to be seen as unnecessary or overtly implicated in identity politics (Koh 2012; Lothian and Phillips 2013). Among the most salient work has been Nishant Shah’s (2015) examination of how institutionalized structures of societal discrimination in an Indian context (such as caste, class, and language) are further entrenched in the digital realm in the context of YouTube videos even when their queerness is foregrounded. Lisa Nakamura (2012) discusses race, gender, and sexuality in the rhetoric of gaming, which, even while critiquing racist and sexist behavior, encourages participants to see it within the structure of the gaming universe and not as something enacted by individuals. This splitting of critiques of

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structural discrimination versus the culpability of individual participants is also something that is seen in media fandom spaces, as I will discuss in the context of fan activism in Chapter 3 and in patterns of fandom community formation and fan work production in Chapters 4 and 5.

Following on from these critiques, I argue that postcolonial cybercul-

tural theory is particularly useful to researchers of these spaces because its theoretical requirements force us to recognize the unevenness and uneasiness of the virtual landscape that cyberdenizens must traverse. This is no longer simply a question of access to digital spaces, though those issues are far from unresolved. They are now also a question of representation and experience within these spaces. I wish to use these strands of theorization in my analysis of media fandom spaces, which are well positioned to help gain insight into the complex questions that have been raised here. In the next section, I trace how postcolonial criticism—with its focus on the ways in which representational power structures geospatial relationships in both historical and contemporary contexts—gives us powerful tools to effect critiques of media fandom communities. Because media fandom comprises a series of transnational spaces in which complex discussions about identity and representation are taking place, this theoretical approach has been especially productive.

The Case for Postcolonial Theory

The decision to engage with postcolonial theory in my analysis of

media fandom communities was something that I came to only gradually. Part of this hesitation was certainly because postcolonial cybercultural theory had not been used in fan studies before. Nevertheless, looking back, my indecision still seems puzzling, especially because my research training was greatly influenced by this school of thought. On further consideration, however, perhaps this hesitation was also informed by the biases in both fields, as postcolonial theory has been circumscribed in the subjects that it has taken up for consideration, mostly focusing on literary and cultural studies and historical analyses. However, that does not mean that it cannot be a useful framework for other fields. As I have already argued, the introduction of postcolonial frameworks to the field of cybercultural studies has resulted in some useful interventions, though there is still much to explore. In the case of fan studies, postcolonial theory can productively engage with analyses

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of popular cultural texts. Finally, the consideration of possible postcolonial audiences of such texts also opens up diverse possibilities for research.

I highlight these last two vectors because it is in their intersections that

a case can be made for positioning media fandom communities as postcolonial cybercultural spaces. I find this framing to be productive, especially when these interlinked communal formations are seen as transnational and transcultural interpretative spaces that must interact with hegemonic popular cultural texts produced by the Global North. These source texts of fannish activity can then be seen to have distinctly neocolonial and neoimperialist effects on global audiences. Indeed, this framing also makes visible global audiences that have themselves been structured through the forces of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. This framing additionally offers a powerful and flexible theoretical grounding for analyzing the possibilities of resistance or talking back to structures of representational power. This has of course always been an area of great interest to fan scholars. However, framed within a postcolonial framework, it demands a sharper consideration of the power dynamics—encapsulating racial, cultural, and ethnic identity as well as gender, sexuality, and nationality—that these popular cultural texts deal in and circulate via increasingly “smooth” (Hardt and Negri 2001) media and informational flows.

These resonances are also crucial to explore, as postcolonial theory

has a deep historical interest in tracing the ways in which power, especially representational power, is circulated, interrupted, and recirculated by the operationalization of dominant cultural logics that continue to function past points of assumed resistance and co-optation. Though articulated at different points of time and to different ends, the central problematics that have animated the interrogations of theorists and writers such as Edward Said (1978, 1983, 1993), Chinua Achebe (1958, 1977), Gayati Chakravorty Spivak (1987, 1988), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) have remained the negotiation of complex questions about what actions can be parsed as decolonizing the mind and to what extent that is even possible. Postcolonial theory, therefore, is broadly concerned with creating tools to confront the continuing realities of representational power as wielded by the Global North and disseminated through various means, whether cultural, economic, or geopolitical. These tools have taken various forms, including deconstructing simplistic notions around center-periphery models, guarding against reanimations of patterns of essentialism that seek to fix identities within (post)(neo)colonial cultural

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conditions, and tracing the dialectical relations between colonizer and colonized to see them as mutually constituted.

Additionally, to see these figurations as tools (or, as Spivak sees them,

problems) and not solutions is crucial to the project. At the core of these negotiation remains the fact that representation is never a straightforward project. As Spivak (1990) asserts, “It is not a solution, the idea of the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical critics speaking for them; this question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem” (63). In my analysis, the “politics of representation” (Hall 1996) is something that fan communities negotiate with on an ongoing basis, and both the tools crafted in these processes and the erasures perpetuated within these spaces can be productively analyzed within a postcolonial framework.

Crucial here is an understanding of the ways in which multinational

corporations extend the operations of neocolonialism and cultural imperialism in the interests of the Global North, as well as how these mechanisms have also superseded purely center-periphery models. Popular cultural texts produced by such sprawling multinational entertainment empires have always perpetuated broadly conservative notions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and history. However, in the contemporary scenario, their effects are now dispersed along lines of interpretation that cannot be mapped directly onto national borders. I argue that these systems of domination, now operate not only on populations that would be termed postcolonial in a traditional sense—such as Disney films being tailored specifically for release in India—but also on individuals and loosely linked communities, which may be diasporic, immigrant, or otherwise liminal, currently located within the boundaries of the neocolonial state while also subject to them. I am not trying to argue that national borders are unimportant but rather that postcolonial audiences for these texts have a greater degree of diversity and mobility than previously conceptualized.

The matter of the dearth of postcolonial critique of nonliterary popular

cultural texts is also relevant here. As Stuart Hall (1998) has noted, popular culture is significant for postcolonial studies because it is a key arena that stages the struggle between capitalist forms of representation and “points of resistance” to them (447). Despite this, the predilection of scholars to view popular cultural texts with suspicion has been regularly commented on (Featherstone 2005; Kato 2007; Devadas and Prentice 2011). There has also been a tendency to elevate folk forms of cultural production as authentic

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representations of subaltern resistance compared to popular cultural texts perceived as more compromised. Chris Bongie (2008) questions this, noting, “Legitimate custodians of a traditional past .  .  . or subaltern adepts in the ethical practices of freedom . . . might be presumed to have better and more ‘authentic’ things to do with their time than watch Roseanne or read Annie John. In the failed dialogue between Roseanne and Kincaid, where are the ‘real’ people situated, presuming ‘they’ even exist?” (283). This predisposition has also spilled into a nonconsideration of the role of postcolonial audiences. Graham Huggan (2012) builds on Bongie’s argument to stress the importance of paying attention to audiences other than readers in postcolonial arenas: “One of the most effective means of exposing this ideological faultiness, and exploring the commonness assumptions that flow from them, is a sustained attention to reception. For reception returns us to the vexed question of value, and the often eclipsed politics of cultural and critical evaluation, that have for too long remained concealed within the field of postcolonial studies” (xv–xvi). It is this “ideological faultiness” that I am concerned with in my work on media fandom communities. As audiences and interpretative communities that have been repeatedly framed as active, self-reflexive, and engaged, they offer an opportunity to interrogate how contemporary media texts that circulate in a neoliberal, globalized economy are received and how they are interpreted. Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson’s (2012) consideration of postcolonial audiences provides the most synergy to my proposed framework when they argue that such analyses could result in “localized readings, aspirational readings, parallel reading, judicial readings, public and private readings, misreadings, communal readings, contrary readings, resistant readings and new technologies of reading [. . . . ] acts of reading can be conceived both inside and outside the structures of empire: as imperializing practice (the colonizing ‘despoiler’ of text) and anti-imperial action (the tactical, marginalized ‘poacher’ of text)” (4). This last idea, tactical poaching, brings these postcolonial possibilities into serendipitous alignment with Henry Jenkins’s (1992) foundational conception of media fandom spaces. I explore these very possibilities in my analysis of these transnational, transcultural spaces.

Media fandom communities operate within and are affected by the

forces of commodity and neoliberal capitalism, cultural imperialism (as most of the texts are US and UK based), and global cybercultural communicative frameworks. These transnational and transcultural communities are

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engaged in the consumption, interpretation, and repurposing of hegemonic popular cultural texts that constantly negotiate not just issues of gender and sexuality (which has been the focus of most of fan studies so far) but also issues of racial, cultural, ethnic, and religious identity. A postcolonial cybercultural critique illustrates how this negotiation is a fraught and messy one that is not conducive to easy formulations of subversion and resistance. This critical lens permits conceptualization of the overlapping aspects of nonwhite fan identities without constructing artificial and simplistic boundaries along national borders.

Too often in academic discussion about fan communities, the specific

effects of the internet as a medium are left out of the analyses undertaken, as if it were a neutral space where access (in the form of a broadband connection) is the only hurdle. When it is talked about, it is mainly in terms of its role in connecting individual fans and fan communities. There is also a lack of attention in the way that the specific platforms that fans use have influenced the discussion of contentious issues like racism within the popular cultural texts themselves and with the fan works produced. Once present on the internet, further possible differences among individual fans and the differences in how they navigate the same networks have remained underexamined. I tackle these issues next.

Media Fandom as Postcolonial Cyberspace

As I note in the Introduction, a cursory scan of the international popu-

lar cultural scene today signals that there has been no better time than the current moment to be a generalized fan. Entertainment companies seem increasingly eager to embrace once reviled productions of fannishness by sponsoring cosplay and fan art contests or by soliciting fan fiction on the Kindle Worlds platform. As interest in the topic grows, ideas about fannish identity, spaces, and productions are becoming increasingly complex both within and outside of fan studies. At this moment, the referents of those terms have also shifted quite a bit from when the first wave of fan scholars conceptualized them as underground, secret subcultural practices (BaconSmith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002). In contrast to this, fan interactions with popular cultural media texts through fan works today are highly visible in mainstream popular culture. Stereotypical representations of fans in those texts (and the surrounding mediasphere) as being irrational and deluded

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still persist, particularly in the case of female media fans producing erotic fan work. However, these fan communities and their labor are also increasingly seen as valuable to producers as entertainment companies often seek to build (often exploitative) relationships with them (De Kosnik 2012; Booth 2015).

Scholarship on fandom has contributed to this mainstreaming of

fans and fan works as they work to undermine unflattering stereotypes by stressing their subversive potential and their self-reflexivity. Nonetheless, this interruption has remained partial, allowing certain assumptions to stand unquestioned. Because of a persistent lack of attention to the specific demographic makeup of these communities, scholars have also contributed to erasures and biases in their representation. Although these communities have always been multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, and although today they are also transnational and transcultural, fan studies has not engaged critically with those dynamics.

Dominant theoretical formulations that frame media fandom spaces as

progressive and that frame fan repurposing of popular cultural texts as inherently subversive have had limited critical engagement with the fact that not all fans are on an equal playing field. Although conflict within fan spaces has received some attention, this has concentrated mainly on the gendered ways that fan practices are policed (Busse 2013a; J. Gray 2005b). Notably absent in mainstream media fan studies is an engagement with, or even an acknowledgment of, the varied demographics of the English-language fan communities that form around the media texts most commonly encountered in fan studies readers or conferences. As Rebecca Wanzo’s (2015) vital intervention into the discipline makes clear, the place of race in fan studies is largely one of elision and deferment. This deferment is further structured into the discipline in its genealogies and theoretical biases. In Chapter 4 I will analyze these structural biases on a micro level through my examination of their functioning with regard to fan work communities themselves. In this chapter, my focus is on expanding the theoretical possibilities available to fandom scholars on a macro level, demonstrating how inclusive frameworks enable more nuanced analyses of fan identity.

Media fandom spaces, theorized as inclusive and liberatory, are not

immune to hierarchies structured by privilege accruing to income, class, disability, and racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. Ironically, this lags behind discussions within actual fan spaces, where these debates have never been

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more energetically pursued. The critiques of these intrafandom dynamics include commenting on the problematics of cosplayers using blackface, yellowface, or other appropriative behavior and pointing out when fan fiction authors use racist stereotypes. In these sometimes fraught exchanges, fans of color are doing the work that fan scholars are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to do: (re)reading the broad claims of the community to show its biases and erasures. This is a meta moment for the field that demands a serious and sustained response in our theorizations.1

I would like to avoid hierarchical judgment calls about good versus bad

fans. Instead I would like to interrogate how transnational fan communities negotiate messy real-world structures of power that do not just go away within safe spaces. This discussion questions the use of national boundaries to limit studies of identity performance within fandom spaces, as this division does not hold up in the face of media fandom practices. I am not proposing that the categories I discuss here are absolute; identity (as performative) is based on shifting markers, and none of these can be construed as a singular, absolute measure of coherent definition. Thus, we as researchers must maximize the flexibility of our own theoretical structures so as to not construct boundaries where there are none.

Conceptualizing Fan Diversity

Following on from Jenkins’s (1992) pathbreaking view of participants as

textual poachers, media fandom has consistently been theorized as a resistant force. This framework most often appears in work on slash fan fiction, but it also addresses other transformative fan work (Russ 1985; Lamb and Veith 1986; Coppa 2008). The activities of these communities have been framed in largely celebratory ways, particularly in terms of how fan writers rework texts to expand their scope. Increasingly, fans as activists are also being theorized as an engaged audience that can be recruited in various ways to band together behind different social causes, such as raising awareness about HIV and the Darfur conflict in Sudan (Jenkins 2012; Hinck 2012). I will interrogate the specific power dynamics at play in fan engagement in social causes in Chapters 3 and 4, but broadly, these developments also frame media fans as politically progressive and invested in various social justice causes. This framing often contrasts with spaces that are dominated by (white) male fans, who, it is argued, often resist texts that push for more diverse representation

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in terms of gender and sexuality, and more recently, racial identity.2 These binary divisions are simplistic, however, and they do not take into account the slippage of identity between fanboy and fangirl. For one, the nonwhite fanboy and fangirl are entirely absent from these analytical frames. Additionally, as Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto (2013) argue, this tends to set up a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” fan practices. This has a twofold effect: bad fan practices that are seen to be rooted in considerations of pleasure are excluded entirely from analysis, and problematic features of good fan practices remain unexamined (97–98).

Consequently, what remains undertheorized is the manner in which

the articulation of identity within these fannish communities affects notions of subversiveness and resistance. One of the primary queries that motivates my own work is the question of what occurs when fan repurposing is subversive in one context (interrupting heteronormative canons) but coercive in another (reinforcing racial power structures). In the context of a networked world, this opens up new communicative possibilities even as it extends the hegemonic workings of capitalist globalization, and issues of racial, cultural, ethnic, and religious identity matter. This also extends to how fan communities receive, consume, and repurpose media.

Within the larger field of fan studies, work that considers racial, cul-

tural, and ethnic identity as a vector of analysis is found mainly in sports and gaming fandoms (Redhead 2014; Sanderson 2010; Leonard 2003; Everett 2005). Additionally, scholars have produced some excellent considerations of specifically African American women fans of television shows like Scandal (2012–) and Empire (2015–) in context with evolving theorizations about connected audiences—for example, by assessing how practices like live tweeting build a networked viewing experience. This has also been linked to the operations of digital communities such as #BlackTwitter (Everett 2015; Erigha 2015; Warner 2014, 2015a, 2015b). In the specific case of media fan scholarship, there have been some attempts to engage with the diversity of media fan communities, but this is done mostly in a transcultural or transnational framework, using national frames of identity as a starting point (Jung and Shim 2014; Lyan and Levkowitz 2015). Although these studies are useful, they compartmentalize what is a transnational and transcultural phenomenon mediated by internet technologies and therefore one that is porous and “spreadable” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013). Indeed, this point is also made by Dani Madrid-Morales and Bruno Lovric (2015), who have chosen a

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language-based model (Spanish) of fan engagement rather than one based on nationality to engage with K-pop fandom across Spain and Latin America. Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) work on transcultural Asian fandoms is also an important contribution to this area.

Anne Kustritz (2015) echoes some of my concerns about scholarly prac-

tices perpetuating certain erasures in the context of European transcultural fandoms: The term fan . . . mediates between local and international media and audiences; it encapsulates a broad range of diverse activities, histories, and practices, which become invisible by attending only to English-language fan spaces, or by assuming that because conversations there take place in English, the participants all come from Anglophone countries. Likewise, European fandoms illuminate many of the pitfalls, and much of the unevenness and uneasiness, that accompany globalization of media and globalization of fan identity and community. (¶ 3.1)

Kustritz identifies two key themes that I now open up to further explo-

ration. First is the question of language and, more pertinent to the current argument, the assumptions made about the participants in Englishlanguage fandom spaces as something that fandom scholars must keep in mind. A failure to do so makes invisible the diversity of fan demographics. Second, she is accurate in describing the global fannish media landscape as an uneven and uneasy one and in naming globalization as one of its key driving forces. Terming it a global mediascape obfuscates the fact that it is dominated by US-produced texts.

The cause of this unease may be linked to the growing influence of

US-centered neoimperialism on the global mediascape. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to ignore this influence when examining the effects of global media flows controlled by largely US-based conglomerates. This is also a vital aspect to consider in light of Hardt and Negri’s (2001) analysis of the operations of imperial nodes of power that are no longer restricted to the actions of specific nation-states but rather intertwined with the operations of multinational companies. Pointing out that Hollywood films have portrayed world events in ways sympathetic to US state interests is not a new observation, but it is important for that link to be stressed in this context (Koppes and Black 1990; T. Shaw 2002; K. Lee 2008). For instance, when

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the email communications of entertainment behemoth Sony Entertainment were hacked in November 2014 and released to the public by Wikileaks, one of the most discussed revelations concerned the level of collusion between the company and the US government (Thielman 2015). It thus becomes imperative to see what kind of pushback, if any, these texts receive in fan communities, which are often lauded for their self-reflexivity.

It is not my intention here to propose an overly deterministic model of

fan consumption in the face of such massive geopolitical forces. Fan scholars have repeatedly contended with the question of how fan activities can be subversive within a neoliberal capitalist consumer culture. In their consideration of fan activism, Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova (2012), quoting Roopali Mukherjee (2011), posit that “commodity activism . . . complicates our understanding of resistance, forcing us to consider ‘civic politics in the neoliberal era’ as possibly ‘enabled by, and nurtured within, modes of consumer citizenship’” (¶ 4.7). Likewise, by incorporating an awareness of how neoimperialism also influences the texts with which media fandom engages and how those engagements proceed, fan studies can further complicate ideas of subversion and resistance. This calls for a broadening of scope in our conception and knowledge of who media fans are, and in the theoretical lenses we utilize for our studies.

A number of intriguing research vectors emerged from the analysis of

my respondent interviews, which help sketch out, to echo Kustritz (2015, ¶ 3.1), the uneasy and uneven relationship that nonwhite fans have to the media texts that they engage with in a transformative framework. This relationship encompasses both the interactions that the individual fans I interviewed had with larger fan discussions on issues like representations (or lack thereof ) of minority cultures in source texts and fan works, as well as the various mediums within which these interactions took place. I turn first to these mediums because they are a vital aspect of online fan culture that has not been addressed adequately.

Use of Fannish Platforms

To riff off (in true transformative style) a favorite Austen quote, it is a

truth universally acknowledged that the move of media fandom communities to the internet changed everything. This has been examined in terms of the internet connecting media fandom participants, allowing unprecedented

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community building and sharing of fan works; it has also been examined in terms of specific platforms (Hellekson and Busse 2006; Booth 2010). However, scholarship has not gone on to interrogate the effects of it as a medium that influences participants’ experiences in markedly different ways. My interviews reveal that changes in platform have had significant effects on the ways in which media fandom debates its own norms and practices.

In the last fifteen years of recorded activity, online fandom commu-

nities have moved (broadly) from platforms like Usenet groups and mailing lists (ONElist, eGroups, Yahoo Groups) to journaling sites (LiveJournal, Dreamwidth) and stand-alone archive websites of individual fandoms or groups of fandoms to host fan work to what are now the current preferred platforms of Twitter and Tumblr, along with broad-based archive sites for hosting fan work (AO3, Wattpad). Fandom interactions on all these platforms have differed according to current norms and practices, and newer participants often brought change. However, the platforms themselves also mediated these interactions, allowing for greater or lesser autonomy, connectivity, and exposure to different ideas. I have already examined some of the effects of the use of Usenet and mailing lists for fan interactions, mainly in terms of their assumptions about membership and expectations around participant interactions, in Chapter 1. Rebecca Lucy Busker (2008) buttresses my own observations in the case of mailing lists—that they exercised a greater degree over the tone of interactions—commenting, “Although lists to discuss issues and themes across multiple fandoms existed, they weren’t always easy to find. Perhaps just as problematic was an implied and even overt hostility to critical discussion. Any non-positive reaction to an individual story tended to be greeted with recriminations, and even a discussion of the problems of a particular theme or genre was likely to be shouted down” (¶ 1.3). It is not difficult to see how this hostility to critical discussion and how an insularity of focus would have manifested in case participants wished to discuss potentially “non-positive” aspects of a source text such as racism. Indeed, such policing, both in terms of content (responses like “this is not an appropriate topic for discussion here”) and in terms of tone (rules like “please keep this list friendly and supportive”) have been recalled by respondents who participated in such spaces. As one interviewee recounted, “Eventually? I found the mailing lists. Not long after *that*, I grew *profoundly* pissedoff with how much censorship was on the main XF [The X-Files (1993–2002)] mailing lists at the time and made my *own* goddamned mailing lists” (Te,

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interview with author, 2014). This is not to maintain that these arguments have not continued to come up in other online forums. Rather, they highlight the fact that the capacity for enforcement of these etiquettes was greater in mailing lists, which had a few key administrators in charge.

The increasing popularity of journaling sites over mailing lists allowed

fans to curate their experiences to a greater extent by choosing other journals to connect to, as well as to create their own space to host fan works, meta discussions, or more personal posts. Busker (2008) notes that these sites made fandom more porous, allowing for individual fans to be more aware of events in other fandoms even though they might not participate in them. This mix of the personal and the political led to more strongly felt opinions being expressed and circulated, contributing to a watershed moment in fandom history in terms of discussing racial dynamics: RaceFail ’09. I have already discussed the events of RaceFail ’09 in Chapter 1, so I will not recount them again. Rather, I would like to discuss the specific influence that the medium of LiveJournal had on the way the controversy unfolded. Although the impact of RaceFail ’09 has been discussed in terms of how it changed the conversations and awareness about race in SF/F spaces, the centrality of the journal format in these interactions has been overlooked (Klink 2010). Whereas on platforms like mailing lists the moderators would likely have quickly shut down such off-topic discussions, the journal format allowed fans to frame their responses to the issues at hand in their own spaces while also connecting to other likeminded individuals. As I note in Chapter 1, the RaceFail ’09 fandom criticism was hosted on journaling sites, leading to a transformative moment of recognizing other nonwhite fans as present and active in fan spaces. This was one of the most productive outcomes of the entire incident. Busker (2008) argues that the journal format was influential because “in many ways it has served to take the focus off the source and put it on the fan, and in turn, on fandom” (¶ 2.2). Although I would argue that the source text remained much in focus in the context of RaceFail ’09, the foregrounding of fan identity as it intersected with issues of racial, cultural, and ethnic representation was uniquely facilitated by the journal platform.

Keeping this mind when formulating the initial questionnaire for my

research, I attempted to track the effects of Racefail ’09 in my questions. Several respondents did mention it as something that had affected their modes of interaction within fandom:

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I think Racefail was huge for everyone who was fannish on LJ at the time, and even for years after. That’s when I really started looking at my own ways of thinking and at the ways fandom interacted with fans of color and characters of color. I started looking through provided links on critical race theory and the prejudices against COC [characters of color]. I owe a lot to fans of color who took a lot of shit back then. (Silent-parts, interview with author, 2014) Racefail made it imperative to engage more, I think. It also has a lot to do with a fact that in ’09, I was no longer a fanbaby insecure about my age or talking about “reverse racism” (no, I really said it once), and neither was I uncertain talking about my location now that I knew there were many others like me. (Swatkat, interview with author, 2014)

The emphasized portion of the aforementioned response also parallels

the roll call of nonwhite fans that was such a powerful moment for author N. K. Jemisin, as I note in Chapter 1. Indeed, there was a consistent thread of registering the confidence felt by nonwhite fans through these moments of recognition and connection.

Although RaceFail ’09 was clearly a tipping point, when asked about

the perceived rise in levels of fannish discourse around issues of privilege associated with racial identity and other axes of marginalization, respondents consistently identified fandom’s move to even more dialogic platforms like Twitter and Tumblr as an accelerant. These platforms clearly offer greater visibility, both in terms of individual fans being willing to claim a nonwhite identity within a fannish space and in finding others who share or understand their experiences. As one respondent noted, I don’t know if this is related at all, but I didn’t come across many FOC [fans of color] until I started engaging in tumblr and twitter! I’ve found that in many of my fandoms, most of the people who were active were white, especially on LJ and dreamwidth. It wasn’t until I got a twitter account that I came across so many FOC, and maybe it’s bad to say this, but I was very surprised to see how many were in fandom. I knew that I was one, and logically there would be more just based on the sheer size of fandom, but it’s different when you actually come across them in another space! (Lquacker, interview with author, 2014)

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In all these instances, it is clear that the discovery of “others like me”

was important in terms of articulating a differential fannish identity. It is also clear that the presumed default representation of fans that I have stressed in Chapter 1 remains a powerful influence even on media fandom participants themselves, even if logically it does not hold up to interrogation.

Other respondents noted that it was only once they realized that there

was an audience, even a small one, for transformative works based on texts like Bollywood movies that they were encouraged to engage with those texts in fannish ways—a vital aspect of the ways in which the structuring power of whiteness in fandom affects fannish engagements with nonwhite characters that is often overlooked. When communitarian aspects of fan work are discussed, this is usually framed around the love of the thing and the expectation of appreciation from a fannish community. However, the effects of a consistent sidelining of certain characters across fandoms— always dismissed on a case-to-case basis—on individual fans’ ability to create fan work has been less discussed. I will examine this aspect in more detail in Chapter 4, but here I highlight it as a thread of interest in my interviews at this point.

The aspect concerning the broad dissemination of, and therefore

access to, discussions problematizing source texts is also linked to the ease with which Tumblr posts can be reblogged. Tumblr’s format is also one that is most suited to visual media—GIF sets, photo sets, fan art—and this has influenced its use and impact. Respondents reflected on the ways such fan critiques often functioned to raise their consciousness, leading them to consider more nuanced understandings of the texts under consideration: I actually think Tumblr is a great medium for promoting the idea of diversity in media, especially for someone who is a little less verbal like me. The art and picture sets on Tumblr help celebrate shows and movies that have interesting characters of color, and they can also be used to critique media that doesn’t do a good job with diversity. (Talitha78, interview with author, 2014) Tumblr, for sure. Twitter’s character limit is really a downer. . . . Tumblr’s also the first platform where I started getting really interested in social issues thanks to the vast number of posts and pages dedicated to them, and the commentary (reasonable or not) that’s tagged onto them. It’s just a lot more

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conducive for longer discourse, which is something that Twitter will never be able to do. (Minyan, interview with author, 2014)

This is not to say that Tumblr as a platform is viewed as unproblematic;

respondents identified issues around the platform stemming from both its platform-specific quirks and its usage by users. One issue that Tumblr was critiqued for was its lack of privacy control, as there is no way of limiting access to specific posts. It is possible to make an entire Tumblr account private, but that limits the amount of engagement that is possible and is counterproductive to fannish activity. Moreover, as a flip side to the visual aspect of the platform praised in Talitha78’s remarks, some respondents were also unhappy that this inhibited the circulation of longer, more nuanced arguments on complicated issues.

In terms of problems with individual use, respondents were uncom-

fortable with the instances where misleading information was amplified as a result of a lack of fact checking. Individual respondents did register their frustrations with aspects of fannish discussions of racial identity that they saw as essentialist or simplistic. However, although these frustrations were strongly expressed, there was an equally strong consensus that this engagement, however flawed, was a better scenario than that of earlier platforms facilitated by fannish structures that were much more uncomfortable with intracommunity criticism. One respondent’s comment encapsulates both these threads: Racefail made things visible, in a certain way. For all the problems with OTT SJW-ing in fan spaces, it is no longer okay to say, “oh, I just don’t identify with characters of color!” Racefail made it possible to engage with the racial faultlines in fandom and the structural problems that lead to white-centric fandoms. Tumblr engagement with race can be over the top to a point of absurdity, but I’d rather have that than no engagement at all. (Respondent 10, interview with author, 2014)3

This observation perceptively addresses the ways in which fandom’s his-

torical modes of engagement with issues of race through events like RaceFail ’09 have responded to changes in platform. Thus, the increased visibility of these discussions is not a result of the activities of only newer fans who

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disregard fandom etiquette and conventions (although of course generational shifts play a part). Rather, it is the critiques of the always present nonwhite fans that have found more conducive platforms and communities of like-minded individuals to amplify their historical concerns. Although other studies of fandoms on Tumblr have also highlighted a trend of fans engaging with social issues in concentrated ways, they have not also engaged with this as an historical movement (Hillman, Procyk, and Neustaedter 2014).

Respondent 10’s remarks are also useful to highlight the messy nature

of these interactions that nonetheless work to underline structural problems that have long plagued fandom spaces. Respondent 10 registers that not all the rhetoric around racial issues in fandom is something universally agreed on by the multitude of nonwhite fans in these spaces. However, in the same moment, Respondent 10 highlights the dehumanizing ways in which these issues have been treated historically in what have been characterized as inherently progressive and liberal communities. Only through a consistent, strident form of critique have some changes in behavioral norms been effected in this regard—a point that must be highlighted because of the gaslighting that occurs in fan spaces, in which individual nonwhite fans are assured that their criticisms are based on imagined slights and ahistorical considerations of fandom behavior.

One fan commented on what she perceived as a lack of contact be-

tween fandoms and individual fans on LiveJournal, citing the creation of “individual echo chambers” (Snackiepotato, interview with author, 2014) that then validated their own preconceived opinions. This term has also been used to describe Tumblr fan communities, where certain types of ghettoization can occur around ideas of essentialism, language use, cultural hierarchies, and fan wars. An example of the nature of Tumblr as simultaneously an echo chamber and interruptable is that of a fan-made GIF set that imagined an Indian wizarding school, a fan expansion of the Harry Potter universe. The GIF set repurposed material from Bollywood films, and the accompanying description leaned heavily on exotic stereotypes like “enchanted saris that shift colors sporadically” and the presence of a magical mango tree (asheathes 2015). This GIF set was extremely popular and received more than 30,000 notes, demonstrating the echo chamber effect, where simplistic ideas of diversity are amplified. However, the wide circulation of the GIF set also resulted in criticism by some Indian fans who used it as a springboard to

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discuss issues like the effects of British imperialism on the development of Indian magic (postmodernpottercompendium 2015).

Clearly, then, the degree of interruptability of a circulating idea is seen

to be greater on more dialogic platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. Twitter was identified by respondents as a more personal space than Tumblr because access can be controlled through privacy settings and sensitive discussions can be carried out without the attendant anxiety of being in an easily permeable space. In most cases fans reported using both Tumblr and Twitter, leveraging each platform’s strengths. When I discussed the Indian wizarding school example with a respondent, the respondent pointed out that the initial discussion about the problematic aspects of the GIF set took place on Twitter before moving to Tumblr (Swatkat, interview with author, 2014). The use of locked platforms to discuss problematic aspects of fan culture also underlines the fact that fandom spaces continue to be hostile to these debates.

Theorizing Global Fandom

There is clearly a great deal of complexity in these interactions—com-

plexity that can be easily flattened if not approached via flexible and inclusive theoretical frameworks. I turn again to postcolonial cybercultural theory as a productive way to theorize this increasing multivocality. This theoretical paradigm has had to grapple with both the liberatory potential of the internet and with the reality of it being inextricably linked to neocolonialism, as capitalism, language use, and technology function within global networks with the aim of retaining the status quo in favor of the Global North (Fernández 1999; Nayar 2008). While traditionally used in historical, cultural, and literary studies, postcolonial perspectives in theorizing cyberculture are vital in order to center its embedded inequalities. As Nishant Shah (2015) warns, Narratives of empowerment, of visibility, and of finding presence within the digital domain flood academic discourse as well as policy and practice that is geared toward getting the disenfranchised visibility in the digital networks. So strident is this narrative, so persuasive in its promises, that it becomes the dominant mode of analyzing cultural products, even in the face of evidence and experience that shows that different intersections of

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historic disadvantage like gender, sexuality, class, caste, religion, language, location, etc. get reconfigured as gating factors to effective presence and voice on the social web.

Some of these same rhetorics continue to inform the frameworks of

fan studies where media fan communities are repeatedly framed as uncomplicatedly oppositional. In this context, postcolonial theory is a productive theoretical apparatus because one of its cornerstones has always been the negotiation of shifting centers and flows of power within such uneven, even hostile, terrain. Pramod Nayar (2008), for instance, argues that multimodal interactive digital spaces can be made postcolonial if they are used with a view to significant political purposes wherein heterogeneity, contestability, and contingency produce these spaces as polyphonic and open-ended.

The synergies among these ideas are obvious to trace; the qualities of

heterogeneity, contestability, and contingency clearly inform the dynamics of online fan communities. Postcolonial critiques have often taken the form of talking back to discourses of power, thus interrupting canonical framings of knowledge and history. The critiques articulated by my respondents enable them, as nonwhite fans, to interrupt both hegemonic popular cultural texts and fan works that reify privileged racial and cultural representations. Taking these dynamics into account, online media fan communities can be theorized as postcolonial cybercultural spaces. These spaces are not unproblematic, reciprocal, or equal fields of debate, but they do acknowledge the complex ways in which individuals negotiate global flows of media and information. For instance, to return to the example of the Indian wizarding school, although the original GIF set was interrupted and critiqued, that critique did not get equal circulation. The burden of education inevitably rests on the postcolonial or minority subject, and interrupting this dominant discourse can still lead to the fan being penalized or tone policed. Therefore, to frame fandom spaces in this way is not to (re)signify them as inherently subversive but rather to demand more nuanced analyses.

This has multiple effects. For one, it forces fan scholars to take seriously

the use of descriptors like “global,” “globalized,” and “international” when speaking about both the circulation of media texts and fan communities. It is not enough to acknowledge that national boundaries are being superseded in both contexts. It is also important for fan scholars to engage with what aspects of fan identity remain unmentioned and therefore invisible.

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Postcolonial theory stresses the value of “glocal” (Robertson 1992) perspectives when discussing the effects of informational flows, pointing out that there is often a reciprocal process whereby the meaning of media texts are influenced by both local and global contexts. When analyzed from this perspective, the ways in which fans work to deconstruct and reify aspects of global media texts produced by multinational corporations, informed by their local circumstances—religion, class, disability, and racial, cultural, and ethnic identities—would broaden the scope of fan studies.

This broadening certainly affected my own research. Part of my anal-

ysis interrogated respondents’ levels of public engagement in discussions about racial identity in fandom spaces. The sample was split evenly in terms of fans with medium and high levels of engagement and those with low levels. Figure 1 shows the distribution of respondents in terms of geographical location, and Figure 2 shows the distribution of respondents according to racial, cultural, and ethnic identity. Both figures are sorted by levels of public engagement in fandom, and as they indicate, in this sample, there initially seemed to be a predominance of people with high and medium levels of

USA UK Sudan Singapore Israel India Chile Canada Australia 0

5 High

10 Medium

15

20

Low

Figure 1. Level of participation in fandom debates sorted by geographical location.

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Pakistani Canadian Mixed Race Latina Latin American Jewish Ashkenazi Indian American Indian Filipino Chinese Australian Chinese Black Sudanese Black Bangladeshi Malaysian Asian American 0 High

2 Medium

4

6

8

Low

Figure 2. Level of participation in fandom debates sorted by racial, cultural, and ethnic identity.

engagement located in the United States. While this might be seen to indicate the merits of concentrating on only the geographical area of the United States in such studies, when the distribution is examined in terms of racial, cultural, and ethnic identity, as shown in Figure 2, a much more nuanced idea of who is engaged in these conversations and to what extent is evident. This also allows further interrogation into the reasons for lower engagement with these issues; respondents identified personal reasons (wanting to avoid confrontation, not feeling qualified to speak) as well as fear of reprisal and

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alienation from larger fandom communities. In Figure 2, as a result of visual constraints, I had to place individuals into simplified categories such as Asian American, whereas in terms of self-identifiers, my respondents were much more specific, with twenty-five specific racial, cultural, ethnic, and religious markers used. These figures thus in a sense encapsulate the struggle of trying to deal with these complex identity articulations within an academic frame.

Although studies that concern themselves with national markers of

influence have important stories to tell, we also need to expand our frames of reference so as not to construct boundaries where there are none. Using a postcolonial frame of analysis would allow for a more flexible and nuanced idea of what individual racial, cultural, and ethnic affinities might look like and how they might operate, thus foregrounding their slippery and shifting nature as markers. Conversely, the examination of these terms in only one national context leaves us open to the danger of reifying them. For instance, one fan attempted to undercut the highly positive critical reception of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) as a feminist movie by critiquing it on the basis of nonwhite representation. This, however, was based on US-centric ideas of race and sparked angry reactions by non–North American fans, who pointed out that there were actually three nonwhite women—Zoë Kravitz, Courtney Eaton, and Megan Gale—in the movie. Further, the fact that Eaton and Gale are biracial Maori women had critical resonance in a film set in a postapocalyptic Australia (fangirljeanne, Tumblr 2015). An Australian respondent also echoed this sense of frustration in a broader context, noting, “The USdominated discussions of racial identity and representation are particularly frustrating because it does not always speak to my context and it can be really simplistic” (Respondent 17, interview with author, 2014).

Conclusion As previously stated, it is not my intention to set up a hierarchy of authenticity regarding either the representations of marginalized racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious identities in media texts or the ways they are discussed in fandom spaces. It is in fact vital to my argument that these interactions be seen as messy, overlapping, and problematic. However, media fandom communities have been repeatedly analyzed as safe spaces, built on principles of gift giving and shared passions for media texts and are billed as progressive

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in their politics (Coppa 2014; Jenkins 2012; Kligler-Vilenchik 2016). Part of this depiction has developed out of the need to reclaim the image of fans as uncritical consumers, and this has been facilitated by scholars with roots in these communities who have been careful not to feed into stereotypes. This is not to say that those characterizations of fan spaces are inaccurate, but perhaps the time has come to talk about how media fandom spaces are also spaces of contention and conflict along specific lines of rupture. Precisely by making ourselves uncomfortable and expanding our frameworks conceptually, geographically, and theoretically can we in fan studies engage with fan cultures that are already global, in all the utopian and dystopian potential of that word.

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So far I have discussed the sporadic nature of conversations concerning racial identity in media fandom that is due to the structuring influences of white privilege, both in terms of the platforms it has chosen and in its mechanics of community formation. I have also posited that the perceived rise in levels of engagement around these issues has been partly influenced by changes in those platforms. I have located my theorization of these fandom formulations as postcolonial cyberspaces and have maintained that these negotiations must be characterized as messy, overlapping, and problematic.

I now examine these interactions in more detail, focusing in particular

on how fan spaces debate (or refuse to debate) the ways that both popular cultural media texts and fan texts tackle complex issues like identity, representation, and authenticity. This conversation is crucial at the current moment; multinational media conglomerates are becoming increasingly sensitive to concepts of social justice activism, often using them as buzzwords. This is partly the result of the increasing visibility of diverse audience demographics for these texts that include women, nonwhite, and queer fans (and those at the intersections of these identities). There is thus an increasing amount of cultural capital being associated with the projection of being socially progressive, though there is considerably less care being taken in terms of any follow-through on these promises.

As an example, in 2014, the movie studios associated with both Marvel

and DC Comics greenlit movies around female superheroes: Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman. Marvel also saw great success with the solo project for

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Black Panther, released in 2018, which was their first movie centered on a nonwhite superhero. While encouraging, these developments often represent a case of window dressing instead of concrete change; they have rarely translated into quantifiable differences in terms of hiring policies or overall output of texts (Hunt and Ramon 2015). These discrepancies have begun to be highlighted through social media campaigns, such as when the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite went viral in the wake of the Academy Award nominations announced on January 14, 2016. The hashtag mobilized the anger that many viewers felt at the fact that, for the second year in a row, not a single nonwhite actor had been nominated for an individual award. This was also reflected in the nominations for the other major categories, including best film. It is also imperative to register the impact of broader interpretive communities like #BlackTwitter on making the campaign viral. The results of the criticism were immediate, as Cheryl Boone Isaacs (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s first African American and third woman president) announced that the body would take action to diversify its voter base. The eventual dilution of the initiative is perhaps emblematic of the struggle to combat institutional racism in Hollywood, but social media was effective in its consciousness-raising activities around the issue (Feinberg 2016). At the 2018 ceremony, viewers also used Twitter to call out the white feminism of Emma Stone and Frances McDormand. This was seen when Emma Stone critiqued the all-male nominees for the best director award even though two of them were nonwhite; it was also evident in Frances McDormand’s call for an inclusion rider to become part of movie deals. While the concept of an inclusion rider—a clause in contracts that can be used to mandate equitable hiring—is conceptualized to be used for the benefit of people from diverse marginalized groups (Truffaut-Wong 2018), McDormand aimed it primarily at the white women in the audience.

The viral power of these campaigns is in part due to the actions of non-

white fans, who are finding more confidence in articulating their concerns around representation in popular media. The increasingly vocal nature of fans about issues relating to various axes of identity—race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion—has prompted various reactions. Some commentators disapprove of such fan entitlement on the grounds that it results in creators being bullied about potentially controversial story lines. Film critic Devin Faraci wrote a blog post entitled “Fandom Is Broken” (2016), which caused

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some controversy, in which Faraci argues that this kind of entitlement is damaging to the creative process because it treats the crafting of stories as solely dependent on the wishes of the audience.

For Faraci (2016) and commentators like him, the problem with fandom’s

engagement with creators in the age of social media is that this kind of criticism is led by populist opinion that has the potential to escalate into violent threats. Although Faraci’s overarching argument certainly holds weight, his analysis lumps all criticism of media texts and creators together, regardless of its source. In this frame, there can be no differentiation made between the vitriol directed toward films like Ghostbusters (2016) by primarily white male fans and the criticism of the Disney film Frozen (2013) whose fans have been advocating that its main character, Elsa, become the company’s first openly queer character in the planned 2019 sequel (Hunt 2016).

As numerous rebuttals to Faraci’s 2016 post also pointed out, this is a

dangerous false equivalence (Mason 2016; Pulliam-Moore 2016). There is, after all, a difference between the sense of entitlement toward popular cultural texts exercised by individuals who have always seen their worldview reflected and those who have not been catered to, in any way, by popular media industries. The increasingly vocal criticism must thus be examined on a case-by-case basis. The various defenses of fandom that I discuss in large part applaud the ability of certain parts of fandom (mostly media fandom) to organize around socially progressive causes; I address this notion of fan as activist next. In the same vein of criticality, however, I contend that such defenses of media fandom communities based on this progressive view of them as interested in social justice issues do not encapsulate the full complexity of the matter either. Fan activism, even when mobilized toward ostensibly liberal causes such as representations of queerness, is still predominantly focused on white characters. The implications of these intersections of power need to be examined in more detail.

The Politics of Fandom Activism

The current theorization of fan activism must be placed in context with

multiple power dynamics that operate within these audiences. There is a growing literature that considers fans as activists to be engaged audiences that leverage personal networks to boost support for particular causes.

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This has been framed within a history of fans organizing support for various issues connected to the popular cultural texts they love, dating back to when a struggling Star Trek was supported through a letter-writing campaign (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 1975). Historically such campaigns have focused on the survival of beloved shows or franchises; in some cases, they have centered on bringing back favorite characters, as in the case of Dr. Daniel Jackson (played by Michael Shanks) on the television show Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007). There have also been more socially conscious campaigns, coalescing around various charitable fund-raising efforts such as the annual “Can’t Stop the Serenity” events (http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/) that are organized in many locations around the world by fans of the Joss Whedon–produced television show Firefly (2002–3) and its follow-up movie, Serenity (2005). These histories have also informed research on recent successful philanthropic actor-led campaigns that have raised awareness and funds around issues such as bullying (Cochran 2012; Stein 2015; KliglerVilenchik 2016).

What is a relatively new development within this trajectory is a growing

interest in fandom spaces as potential sites of organization, where fans are motivated to put their support behind various socially progressive causes without being overtly associated with any one political ideology. Henry Jenkins (2012) examines the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a US-based nonprofit organization, which he described as “a sustained effort to mobilize a network of fans of J.  K. Rowling’s fantasy books around an array of different issues and concerns, ranging from human rights in Africa to rights to equal marriage, from labor rights to media concentration and net neutrality” (¶ 1.9). Jenkins’s discussion foregrounds the possibility of fan spaces prompting and sustaining civic action by harnessing the power of particular narrative universes. HPA founder Andrew Slack articulates this strategy as one of “cultural acupuncture,” which encapsulates finding where the psychological energy is in the culture, and moving that energy toward creating a healthier world. . . . We activists may not have the same money as Nike and McDonald’s but we have a message that actually means something. .  .  . What we do not have is the luxury of keeping the issues we cover seemingly boring, technocratic, and inaccessible. With cultural acupuncture, we will usher in an era of activism that is fun, imaginative, and sexy, yet truly effective. (Quoted in Jenkins 2012, ¶ 4.6)

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Although HPA’s work undoubtedly has some positive effects, the fram-

ing of such civic engagement as “fun” and “sexy” is questionable, especially in regards to issues like the Darfur crisis1 (one of the issues with which the HPA has engaged). This kind of approach, where complex situations are mapped onto simplistic good-versus-evil narrative paradigms, can lead to dangerous outcomes, especially when local realities are ignored for a bigger picture. This happens most frequently when good-intentioned actions are pursued in African countries, where deeply parochial and colonialist stereotypes still influence such actions’ perception, particularly in the Global North. The attitudes at the interstices of global network societies I discuss in the last chapter is developed further in Trish Salah’s (2014) examination of imperialist Western feminism in activist fandoms, such as the “Can’t Stop the Serenity” events, with regard to Muslim women.

Another egregious example of this occurred when the organization

Invisible Children sought to bring the world’s attention to the fate of Ugandan child soldiers through the release of a video, Kony 2012, on YouTube on March 5, 2012, which highlighted the activities of a local warlord, Joseph Kony. It went viral, garnering millions of views and causing a global outcry. While this would make it, by Slack’s formulation, truly effective, it was also the target of much critique from Ugandan scholars, journalists, and activists. These critiques pointed out that the video mobilized age-old, racist, and colonial stereotypes about Africa as an undifferentiated continent full of war and savagery rather than foregrounding the complexity of the situation (Kagumire 2012; Mamdani 2012; Mengetsu 2012). Teju Cole, a Nigerian American writer, points out that the video was the epitome of what he calls the “White-Savior Industrial Complex” (2012), which concentrates on a particular “inhumane” event without reflecting on the ways that event is informed by histories of colonial and neocolonial interference by Western nations. He argues, “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.”

Invisible Children was one of the organizations, along with HPA, exam-

ined as an example of successful fan-based activism in an article included in a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. The piece, which was written before the release of the Kony 2012 video, was based on interviews with members of the organization and was largely hopeful in tone. However, in an addendum provided after the release of the video, and in response to the criticism that it received, the authors further speculated that

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at least some of the critique around Kony 2012, we argue, can be read as a policing of the boundaries of social action, and what it should look and feel like. Many of these critiques claimed that social advocacy should be left to experts—to politicians, to “serious” NGOs, to erudites. Although some of the criticism was undoubtedly unique to Invisible Children, fan activism, which calls for a different genre of activism that is playful, imaginative, social, and fun, may encounter similar critiques in the future. Kony 2012 thus powerfully exemplifies the power of fan activism while presenting a cautionary tale about some of the harsh reactions with which it may be met. (KliglerVilenchik et al. 2012, para 7.5)

Indeed, the “harsh” reactions that the video prompted were well

founded; the roots of the disjunct are identified in Cole’s (2012) critique. Although “playful, imaginative, social, and fun” styles of activism may have a place in modern conceptualizations of civic action, they were wholly incongruous in this case and were informed by incredible amounts of privilege. This problem is gestured toward in the original article (though not developed in the addendum) when the authors acknowledge that the majority of the members of both organizations came from privileged racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

This complexity of power relations is a critical aspect to be considered

when reading the multiple defenses of fandom that responded to Faraci’s (2016) simplistic piece. These defenses, much like the threads of theorization I have traced, celebrated the resistance of media fandom in particular, seeing it as a response to the domination of popular cultural media texts by mainly straight white male creators. While true to a certain extent, it must also be noted that many of the most vocal protests still concern white characters. For example, when the CW television show The 100 (2014–) killed off the character of Lexa (a queer white woman) in a depressing continuation of the expendability of lesbian characters, the event was roundly condemned and deservedly got a huge amount of fan backlash (Roth 2016). However, as some nonwhite fans of the show pointed out, the same fan base had been ignoring the hugely racialized violence that was a staple of the narrative from its inception. It is necessary to pay attention to these patterns of prioritization so as to identify which characters are consistently valued over others within fandom spaces, even when issues of social justice are highlighted.

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Additionally, while the scholars quoted tend to frame this relationship

among consumption, activism, and fandom as relatively new, this does not hold quite as true across the board. Rebecca Wanzo (2015) points to the fact that a focus on nonwhite fans (in her case African American fans in the United States, but the argument also holds true for other demographic groups) complicates long-held assumptions about fan behavior, particularly around notions like alterity and outsider status. Consumer activism in particular has long been a tradition in Black fandom spaces in the United States. As Wanzo points out, Economic power has often been a large part of black consumption and resistance to various forms of popular culture. Activists call for boycotts of negative representations and suggest that African Americans need to support or reject certain performers or films. .  .  . The Black Power movement would usher in an increased interest in works that challenged stereotypical representations of African Americans, and racially conscious African Americans would be encouraged to see, watch, and listen to more radical black cultural productions. For African Americans, consumerism can be an act of resistance in itself, because, as legal scholar Regina Austin (1994) has argued, black shopping and selling are often read as deviant. (¶ 2.15)

It is thus essential to examine cases of fan critique and media cam-

paigns in which there is a foregrounding of such inequalities and their attendant complex intersections around such axes of identity as race, gender, class, and sexuality. Campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite do not position fans as largely nonpolitical or acting out of purely philanthropic reasons. Wanzo’s (2015) example of fandom activity as something required of African American communities as a means of carving out a space for themselves in mainstream media also shows the historical roots of the ways in which media fan communities engage with these issues today.

In the age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, it is clearly becoming

a matter of brand positioning for entertainment companies to be seen as attentive to audience concerns around issues like racism, sexism, and homophobia. This is not to say that big-budget productions produced in this atmosphere are any less likely to contain discriminatory stereotypes; however, social media today allows for criticism of them to reach a greater

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audience and potentially to affect box office performance. I turn now to these dynamics.

Fandom Activism and the Politics of Representation and Authenticity

One of the first such cases to make a large-scale impact on fannish

spaces was initiated in 2008 when fans of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–8) came together to protest the whitewashed casting of its live-action adaptation. In tracking the growth of the campaign, L. K. Lopez (2012) notes that it began with some of the artists who worked on the original show starting an anonymous LiveJournal community around the slogan “Aang ain’t white!” This grew into a letter-writing campaign, which was ignored but prompted two fans to found a separate site (and corresponding LiveJournal community) called Racebending.com.2 Rather than restating the details of that campaign, I will instead examine how some of the issues it raised continue to inform fandom debates around notions of identity, diversity, representation, and authenticity. Indeed, the term “racebending” has grown beyond this use to signify a powerful fan practice often used to interrupt dominant narratives about what forms certain stories and characters must take in order to be successful.

Racebending.com did not appear in a vacuum but within an envi-

ronment of a growing willingness to talk about aspects of fan identity not limited to gender and sexuality. I have already commented on the ways in which specific platforms have influenced the dissemination of such discussions; Sangita Shresthova and Anna Van Someren (2010) support this argument in their description of one of the founders of Racebending.com, Lorraine Sammy, as a “quiet observer” of Racefail ’09 on LiveJournal. Sammy contends that those debates, as well as the people she encountered in those spaces, “raised her awareness of racism within fantasy spaces and its impact on everyday life.”

The aims that Racebending.com articulated during its first campaign

(which are now carried on through platforms such as Tumblr and in panels at fan conventions) has been to “advocate for underrepresented groups in entertainment media . . . dedicated to furthering equal opportunities in Hollywood and beyond” (Racebending.com, “About Us”). Their activity since the campaign concentrating on Avatar: The Last Airbender has revolved

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primarily around drawing attention to the casting choices of big US-based studios, particularly when they cast white actors to play nonwhite characters.

Although this advocacy fulfills a vital function, Lopez (2012) points

out that the initial campaign also prompts complex questions about what constitutes a character’s or actor’s true racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. In the case of Avatar: The Last Airbender, for instance, the source text is set in a mythologized land, and the character designs draw from a range of Asian and indigenous cultures. Lopez points out, We must consider how this discourse contributes to an essentialized or fixed notion of Asia. Not only do these images suggest that an escalating pile of artifacts can be used to ascertain what is really Asian and what is not, as if Asian identities cannot exist outside of these artifacts, but we are to use this evidence to match a racialized body to this perfect image of Asianness. This becomes somewhat difficult given that the show seemingly appropriates and mixes cultural artifacts from a wide range of Asian cultures, none of which could be accurately represented by any single actor. Moreover, who and what constitutes “Asia” is also a debatable topic, given that the geographical, racial and cultural boundaries surrounding what we might consider “Asia” are shifting and contextually constructed. .  .  . The demand for an Asian actor to play the role of Aang also assumes that identity and representation can be collapsed within an actor’s body, when representation is always a mediation and our identities can rarely be straightforwardly mapped out without any complexity or shading. (435)

This critique identifies the difficulty central to any such discussion of

what constitutes an authentic representation of any particular identity, whether sexual, gendered, racial, cultural, or all of these at once. As Lopez points out, the arguments about the Asianness of the original text must rely on an ossification of identity that accepts the melding of entirely disparate cultural markers into a common narrative universe. The matching of an appropriate racialized body to this universe (itself the production of a white creative team) leads to complex questions about what visible racial signifiers would be valued most in such a scenario.

However, these debates are not being conducted in a space where both

white and nonwhite bodies are subjected to the same modes of racialization. As reflected in the debate I noted in Chapter 1 about the casting of

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Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the slipperiness of racialized markers is only ever mobilized in defense of white actors getting cast in supposedly universal roles. In contrast, however, this consideration is almost never granted to nonwhite actors, as indicated by the backlash received by those who take up supposedly neutral roles—John Boyega as a storm trooper in The Force Awakens (2016) and Zendaya as M.J. in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), to name only two instances.

These debates are by no means a new phenomenon. Discussions of the

politics of representation after the cultural and discursive turns, particularly around marginalized subjects, have been taken up repeatedly in disciplines including feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory (Hull, BellScott, and Smith 1982; hooks 1984; Mohanty 1984; Trinh 1989; Gates 1993; Morris 1994; Puar 2007). Although these theorizations cover a wide and complex range of ideas, a shared concern has coalesced around how these regimes of representation or how these signifying practices that structure how we see the world function through exclusion and boundary policing, even when used in the service of politics oppositional to oppressive systems of governance.

Of these debates, Stuart Hall’s examination of Black cultural represen-

tation in the United Kingdom remains foundational. In “New Ethnicities” (1996), he maps the ways in which the term was coined as “a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnic identities” (442). For Hall, this politics of resistance, initially formed around a double-pronged push for access to representational space for Black artists and a contestation of their marginal position, morphed into a new phase. He posits that this was a shift from “the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself,” which signaled an “end to the innocent notion of the essential black subject” (444). This was in effect a call to end the claims of authenticity for any sort of cultural production—not as a sign of defeat but as an acknowledgment of the vast heterogeneity that makes up any racial or ethnic category and its inherent slipperiness. For Hall, to be involved in a politics of representation is to be “plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate: a critical politics, a politics of criticism” (445).

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Almost twenty years later, although the notion of authenticity remains

(rightfully) suspect in critical discourse around representation, it is equally clear that it continues to mediate (in one form or another) any text’s relationship to the cultural signifiers it engages with in its narrative. This remains especially true for popular cultural texts with great power to influence narratives about already marginalized individuals. With the growth of social media platforms and blogging practices, it has become increasingly common to find these texts being interrogated by these individuals themselves, often mobilizing the language of authenticity, with all its problematic associations. This is also the case in fandom communities.

However, it is also clear that although a certain amount of boundary

policing and essentialist discourse is present in these critiques, the dialogic nature of fannish spaces ensures that Hall’s (1996) description of a critical politics as a “maelstrom” of debate also remains relevant to any theorization that is attempted. To refer back to the example of the Indian wizarding school I cited in Chapter 2, both versions of how Indian magic might function drew from regimes of representation and authenticity while also showing how those concepts are, in Hall’s words, “continuously contingent.”

In terms of bodies being raced correctly, it is also crucial to remember

that these classifications have a specific (often violent) history perpetuated under the guise of scientific endeavor. The supposed science of race is one such legacy of scientific classification, especially accounts of sexuality in the eighteenth century (Dennis 1995; S. Somerville 2000; Sullivan 2003). Therefore, to insist that any particular combination of markers based on physical appearance or hereditary traits is authentic with regard to a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural identity comes dangerously close to replicating and reifying these same violent classifications. Lopez’s (2012) concerns around the discursive construction of racial identity in fan spaces also follow this logic. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that although racial identity as a comprehensible category cannot be defined at any single or absolute biological level, the idea that it is a biological attribute remains prevalent, and discrimination on the basis of perceived racial identity remains as entrenched as ever in every aspect of our lives.

This is also applicable to the influence of white privilege when it comes

to the texts that form the focus of media fandom communities. The casting practices of US-based movie and television studios are certainly influenced

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by such biases. However, the elevation of white male protagonists over all others within fan spaces is part of that same continuum. The fan practices under consideration here must thus be seen as attempting to articulate differential modes of resistance in these particular contexts. These modes of resistance are messy, and when framed in casual speech, they sometimes seem to reify dangerous ideas of authenticity. However, in practice, they may also produce (or hold the potential to produce) multiple authenticities.

The Case for Differential Authenticities

One of the ways to approach these multiple authenticities is through

John L. Jackson’s (2005) influential conceptual framing of what he terms “racial sincerity,” which he articulates as functioning differently from racial authenticity. Jackson’s theorization maps out the ways in which individuals continually rearticulate their relationships to their raced identity, both on their own and as part of a community. His work grows out of his anthropological studies in Harlem, New York. Subsequent scholars have built on these theoretical apparatuses in different contexts, using them to situate enquiries into racial identity as a dynamic and mutable component in arenas of cultural production where performativity is foregrounded. These include topics as diverse as hip-hop music and fashion, as well as examinations of high-profile public figures such as Michelle Obama (Warikoo 2007; Harrison 2008; Fraley 2009; Saucier 2011; White 2011). Jackson’s (2005) formulation is predicated on the problematics of negotiating the shifting shoals of identity politics that remain central to civil rights movements even as they are increasingly decried as essentialist and failed in some parts of academia. He observes that often “race is seen as the restrictive script we use to authenticate some versions of blackness, whiteness, brownness, yellowness, and redness while simultaneously prohibiting others” (2005, 13).

Marginalized groups that work to highlight the role of racialization in

institutional discrimination against them do not specifically advocate for essentialist and prescriptivist modes of identity, but it is undeniable that this strategy is a double-edged sword. In the case of media fandom, debates about authentic casting or aspects of storytelling often devolve into essentializing discourses that come uncomfortably close to replicating the very oppressive structures they aim to resist. For instance, the pushback against

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the appropriation of the bindi by white celebrities often uses the argument that it is not just a cosmetic ornament but has sacred significance within Hindu traditions. As Nirmal Puwar (2002) argues, it is certainly true that the orientalist underpinnings of multicultural fashion are the reason that such ethnic markers are only seen as new and edgy choices when worn by white celebrities. Conversely, when worn by nonwhite individuals, they function as dangerously othering mechanisms. However, it is also true that the rhetoric surrounding the debate often (unwittingly) draws on language mobilized by the right-wing Hindu upper caste (in India and abroad) to create a pure and ossified true Hinduism that is used against historically oppressed groups. This is not to argue that intracommunity conflict about the meanings and ownership of certain cultural artifacts invalidates their authenticities but rather to underline their contingent nature.

Jackson (2005) articulates this conflict as oscillating around the idea of

agency. He argues that authenticity “presupposes a relation between subjects (who authenticate) and objects (dumb, mute, and inorganic) that are interpreted and analyzed from the outside, because they cannot simply speak for themselves” (14). In contrast, sincerity sets up a different paradigm entirely: A mere object could never be sincere, even if it is authentic. Sincerity is a trait of the object’s maker, or maybe even its authenticator, but never the object itself, at least not as we commonly use the term. Instead, sincerity presumes a liaison between subjects—not some external adjudicator and a lifeless scroll. Questions of sincerity imply social interlocutors who presume one another’s humanity, interiority and subjectivity. It is a subject-subject interaction, not the subject-object model that authenticity presumes—and to which critiques of authenticity implicitly reduce every racial exchange. (14)

Sincerity, then, is always an exchange of meaning rather than an impo-

sition. Jackson’s framework offers one way of evaluating how texts that deal with representations of marginalized communities and individuals (specifically in terms of racial scripts, but also how those scripts interact with gender, sexuality, religion, and so on) work and what reactions they generate. To simply dismiss these reactions as boundary policing and inherently flawed is to lose a vital interactional component, especially within fandom communities

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that build their own relationships with texts that they acknowledge are flawed but that still offer a sincere articulation of their social realities.

For Jackson (2005), people’s affinities to racial scripts do not automat-

ically fence them into essentialist positions; rather, they offer ways of sharing common experiences (especially in cases of marginalization) as well as disparate ones that lead to the production of further sincerities (15). He also stresses that by allowing for sincerity as a model of interactional racial productions and relations, the contingency and ephemeral nature of all such performances is underlined: Sincerity highlights the ever-fleeting “liveness” of everyday racial performances that cannot be completely captured by authenticating mediations of any kind. Where authenticity lauds content, sincerity privileges intent— an interiorized intent that decentralizes the racial seer (and the racial script), allowing for the possibility of performative ad-libbing and inevitable acceptance of trust amid uncertainty as the only solution to interpersonal ambiguity. With sincerity as a model, one still does not see into the other, one still does not know if one can trust the other’s performances (a partiality and steely eyed skepticism it shares with authenticity discourse); however, one recognizes that people are not simply racial objects (to be verified from without) but racial subjects with an interiority that is never completely and unquestionably clear. Racial subjects demand a mutual granting of autonomy and interiorized validity that outstrips authenticity’s imperfect operationalizations. (17–18)

Jackson’s formulation injects a vitality and “live-ness” to concerns about

how racial signifiers function between individuals and communities, but also to concerns about how popular cultural texts can be seen to operate. In terms of fandom communities, the idea of sincerity also encapsulates the emotional and interactional elements that are contained in fan reactions (both positive and negative) to particular texts. These reactions can be parsed in terms of fan activism and in more specific practices that produce individual fan works. Sincerity as an analytical category allows for the examination of how imperfect texts are simultaneously loved and critiqued by members of an engaged audience that are also articulating and rearticulating their own raced, gendered, and sexualized selves in response to the various societal scripts around them.

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To return to the campaign around Avatar: The Last Airbender using this

formulation, it is possible to see how such sincerity operated to establish its rhetorical and consciousness-raising strategies. In opposition to Lopez’s (2012) analysis, I argue that it was not that participants in the campaign believed that the text represented an undifferentiated Asian body but rather that they recognized (and mobilized against) specific racist casting practices of the Hollywood studios. Similarly, the signifiers of Asianness in the text were underlined through comparisons to real-world artifacts and cultural practices in the pursuit of a specific goal. The collective identity in this case was not just based around fans’ own racial, ethnic, or cultural identity; it was also based around their identity as fans of the series. Racebending.com makes a point of emphasizing the demographic diversity of their supporters by stating, “7 out of 10 Racebending.com supporters are NOT of Asian descent. People from many different ethnic groups felt strongly opposed to the film’s casting decisions” (Racebending.com, “Demographics of Racebending.com Supporters”). Racebending.com cites a survey of supporters showing that 60 percent of the respondents identified themselves as white. This is an important point: it shows the possibility of such campaigns forging intersectional solidarity around social justice issues while keeping the voices of those primarily affected by such inequalities at the forefront. This is also seen in the other campaigns that Racebending.com continues to run, as well as in their boosting of similarly themed educational and activist posts from other sources on their Tumblr blog.

This aspect of constructed and expressed solidarity among fans who

might come from different racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds but who wish to engage and support strategic consciousness-raising critiques across popular cultural texts was reflected in my interview data. As one respondent notes, “Most of the events that have moved me to engage have been directly related to anti-blackness since Latinos are simply not represented in media. But I think it’s important to non-black poc to speak up and show solidarity with black people and black fans” (Silent_parts, interview with author, 2014). Reactions like this reflect a broader concern for issues of diversity and representation that do not necessarily match up to respondents’ own specific identities. However, they are informed by a shared experience of marginalization and misrepresentation within white character–centric fandom texts and communities. This is not to say that frustrations about the perceived level of engagement with various issues were not also expressed:

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Discussion of race in fandom tends to center around black and maybe Latin@ issues and characters; Asian and Asian-American issues are mostly invisible (Mako Mori is an exception). When they do pop up, I’m sometimes kind of uncomfortable with the tack they take, because they sometimes seem to involve non-Asians making sweeping statements about Asian culture that lack nuance, and then sometimes mashing Asian-Americans (who have complex and widely varying negotiations between the two halves of their identity) into that mold. (Respondent 7, interview with author, 2014)3

This kind of discomfort is important to register because it shows that

these alliances and resonances are not uncomplicatedly felt or expressed. Although one of my aims is to show how nonwhite fans articulate strategies to talk about how media fandom spaces in many ways remain unsafe and unwelcoming, it is not my intention to treat these strategies as all-encompassing. Broadly, however, a sense of solidarity was expressed in interviews around signal-boosting critiques even as the US-centricity of such discussions was repeatedly underlined.

Fans of Color

Another question that arises here is whether a further consolidation of

identity can be observed in these cases. That is, do fans in this kind of discursive space also self-identity or ally themselves with specific labels such as “fan of color”? There seems to have been a recent increase in the circulation of such terms within fandom spaces, so this trend merits further investigation. The problems inherent in such a nomenclature stem, again, from its US-centricity—something that respondents from other countries repeatedly flagged as frustrating.

This issue is not limited to fandom spaces. The ways in which the

US-centric language and theorization of activism around queerness, gender, and race have been enforced on the rest of the world are echoed in other aspects of creative industries, including the globalized literary landscape. One example of this linguistic didacticism and its effects is seen in the writing of Vajra Chandrasekera, a Sri Lankan SF/F writer. He talks about his disorientation at being identified as a person of color overnight by being published in the US marketplace. His experience of being online before and

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after this explicit racial marking also informs my theorization about the ways in which the internet is decidedly not neutral. He notes, I’ve been online in some shape or form for twenty years, but never as myself, never under my real name and identity like this; back in the day it was normal to use pseudonyms, and by the time that convention changed I’d settled into habits. All this——came about because I wanted to publish as myself, under my real name. And when I started to publish in US markets, this “of color” thing started to become a thing. The very first time I heard the phrase “person of color” online (fortunately, this was before it was applied to me), I thought it was some sort of slur. This is, as far as I can tell, a common reaction for many non-Americans who encounter the phrase for the first time: a raised eyebrow and a “you called me a what now?” (Chandrasekera 2015)

The “raised eyebrow” is well taken, and indeed, in my examination of

fandom use of the term “fan of color,” quite a few of the respondents raised their eyebrows as well. However, I am also interested in how Chandrasekera’s online experience remained outside of identity politics only as long as he remained unmarked under a pseudonym that was disassociated from his “real name and identity.” This resonates with media fandom spaces as well, in which nonwhite fans have often passed until a point where they have felt confident enough to declare themselves in some way. What would have happened if Chandrasekera had identified himself in those spaces? As has been established, most online interactions cannot but be colored (pun intended).

For Chandrasekera (2015), the use of the term “people of color” outside

the United States makes little sense because its power is contextualized within specific histories of marginalization. Outside of that however, the term becomes a “pure statement of American cultural hegemony.” Despite this declaration, he does go on to admit that he does not have any answers to this conundrum either. After all, to remain unmarked is not to remain outside the global discourses of power that affect how his fiction is read and marketed. The power of the marketplace in SF/F specifically still rests in the United States, whose influence on publishing success both in terms of generating sales and garnering critical recognition remains significant.

Chandrasekera was always already interpolated in those discourses,

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even before he consciously became a “person of color,” and he will have to continue to navigate around that identity in one form or another. The forces of neoimperialism and globalization thus combine to enforce the very language through which any resistance can be articulated. This same conflict is seen around the term “fan of color” in my interview data. When asked about their opinion of the term, respondents gave a variety of responses. Some respondents recognized the potential usefulness of the term but also pointed out the main limitation: making all nonwhite fans appear to be a homogenous mass: It’s good as an umbrella. It shouldn’t be allowed to erase that there are significant differences in the interests and needs of specific ethnic and race groups within the “of color” community. What I look for and need from fandom as a Black American fan aren’t going to be the same as a Latinx American fan, or South Asian British fan, and I wouldn’t want people to think that, for instance, writing about one character of color is sufficient for all of us to feel represented. (Respondent 3, interview with author, 2014)

Others, however, interpreted it as way of marking themselves out in a

space that is still often presumed as or defaults to white-centric. This was interpreted to have both positive and negative repercussions: I think it tends to go 50/50 . . . i usually go by fan but sometimes there are moments when i remember that i am a fan of color and it’s not the same experience, if that makes sense? i guess i really wish i could just see myself as a fan but i feel like that erases a pretty significant part of my identity. (Arzoensis, interview with author, 2014) I like it, I guess. I am not actively making myself invisible anymore, like I did years ago. I am a fan and I am several minorities in one. (Snackiepotato, interview with author, 2014) In an intriguing variation on that theme, some respondents saw its use as reifying the idea that fandom is somehow essentially for white people, with nonwhite fans forever figuring as outliers and exceptions. They objected to this strongly, reaffirming their right to fannish spaces:

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I use it when talking to other fans of color, or fans of . . . non traditional sexual orientation (?). I guess we using it mockingly among ourselves, a badge of “other” honor? I don’t like seeing fandom as a whole use the term because it just reiterates the idea that you can’t just be a “fan” if you’re not white. (Respondent 12, interview with author, 2014) Weird. On one hand, it’s like . . . why are we getting singled out again? Are white people the default for “fan” then? But on the other, if it gives our opinion on issues more legitimacy, then I’m all for that. (Minyan, interview with author, 2014)

I was intrigued by this set of responses because they highlight the dif-

ficulties of articulating the experience of being marginalized in such spaces without perpetuating those same othering mechanisms. My respondents struggled with the ways these terms provide tools that both legitimize their experiences and mark them off from the fandom mainstream.

For some respondents, however, the term “fan of color” brought up

considerations of identity as primarily outside fandom spaces. These respondents chose to articulate them as separate (though allied) aspects: I don’t use the terms Fan of Color or Person of Color/POC. I strongly dislike the term POC, but I accept that others identify that way, so I can respect the use in that context. When I talk about my identity, I’ll say I’m a person of mixed heritage. I’ve recently discovered the Hawaiian term “hapa” for mixed. For representation in media, I am more likely to say “other than European ancestry” or “other than ‘white’” (in quotes). (Butterflydreaming, interview with author, 2014) I’ve never used it, though I wouldn’t mind, but I think People of Color is more widely-known, and if I were describing myself I’d say Person of Color who is a Fan. However, I can see the benefit of Fan of Color—it makes being a POC intrinsic to being a fan, and also the phrasing has a double-reading that you are a fan of the idea of diversity. (Respondent 10, interview with author, 2014) I don’t tend to use it, but I don’t object to it. I guess I’m more likely to think of myself as a woman of color (who happens to be a fan) rather than a fan of color, if that makes sense. (Respondent 7, interview with author, 2014)

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The aforementioned responses point to the complexity in the way these labels are being thought through within fan spaces and how they might be expressed differently in different environments. Jackson’s (2005) emphasis on the interactional and contextual element of racial sincerity rings especially true for this set of responses, as the respondents were clearly aware of the various layers of historical meaning that have accrued to such labels, as well as what they might signify in the future.

In the same vein, other respondents spoke of the use of “fan of color”

as strategic, which ties in to my earlier argument about nonwhite fans using rhetorical strategies to form loose, contingent, and informal alliances in order to help make a larger point or support a particular popular cultural text without that translating into a formal identification. They also spoke of it as a tool to find other nonwhite fans and as a signal to identify that they share common ground in terms of their engagement with fannish spaces: I feel like I’d identify with this term differently with different people. I’d never call myself that here (in Mumbai), but abroad I used it while talking to other fans of color. (Hena, interview with author, 2014) I don’t use it except for strategic circumstances, for the sake of simplicity or solidarity. (Swatkat, interview with author, 2014) I don’t like it and I would prefer not to use it for myself, but there have been occasions where I’ve had to (as solidarity, as identifier). (Respondent 13, interview with author, 2014) I feel it’s a shorthand and useful way to describe a group of people, especially in heavily US-dominated, English-language discourse. It does have the effect of linking you to other non-white fans and makes it easier to search for more racially diverse media. (Respondent 17, interview with author, 2014)

One respondent, interestingly, articulated discomfort with such a term

being applied to fandom spaces and activities at all: I don’t use it myself, but I also don’t know if I would use “fan” as an identity, either. I think of fandom as something I do and participate in, rather than being something I /am/. Woman of color’s origin is very much rooted in

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radical activism, so I would also not associate fandom with a radical political identity. (Lurrel, interview with author, 2014)

I would like to build on this response in the context of a point raised

in Chapter 2: the extension of the identifier of “fan” to indicate a marginalized identity. This trend is repeatedly seen when theorizing the ways in which fans deviate from prescribed societal norms through their passionate engagement with media objects. These theorizations have usually coalesced around the concept of transgressive pleasure, especially with regard to erotic fan works in the context of media fandom. However, because these theorizations have generally only paid attention to how these transgressions operate around the axes of gender and sexuality, the effects of the racializations of these spaces have remained unexamined. My disquiet with characterizing media fandom participants as inherently marginalized stems from this disjunct. Without an intersectional analytical frame, these analyses remain alienating for many nonwhite fans.

Finally, there were some respondents who wholeheartedly embraced

the term precisely because in their view it is something self-crafted, drawing from a radical political legacy: “I love the term ‘fan of color.’ I like *most* of the labels that we’ve come up with for ourselves, actually. I like *labels*—they tend to make things easier, just in terms of the gross ‘who the hell are we, anyway?’ definitions” (Te, interview with author, 2014).

As this selection of quotes shows, there was a considerable difference of

opinion around such labels. Most significant to me is the respondents’ strategic mobilization and their ways of connecting. The focus on these labels as a shorthand, and their use as contingent rather than as some kind of rallying cry, is crucial to the ways in which nonwhite fans negotiate the fannishness demanded of them in various contexts. These demands can take different forms. Sometimes it may be a demand to stay silent in spaces that are dismissive or transparently hostile to discussion of these issues. Conversely, it may be a demand to become spokespersons, educators, or sole creators of more diverse content. One respondent talked of the double-edged sword the latter style of labeling can be: I feel like there’s a marked difference in treatment that I get when people call me out for whitewashing/racism and I mention that I’m a woman of color and yes this was a conscious choice. Which. It squicks me out. It feels like a

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box that simultaneously places on me the burden of speaking for all of my group, lifts me above (sort of ) being attacked for problematic stuff in fics and yet also limits/overwhelmingly shapes how I can talk about a race/ethnicity issue. So not overfond of it. (Tobermoriansass, interview with author, 2014)

This simultaneous use of and discomfort around the labeling of racial,

cultural, and ethnic identity in fandom spaces is therefore indicative of the fraught nature of these negotiations and the erasures that they sometimes effect. However, within my recorded responses, there is also a repeated conviction that these strategies are still required as methods for finding likeminded fans, signal-boosting critiques, or pushing back fandom juggernauts inevitably focused on white characters. The reservations expressed by respondents further point to an acknowledgment of the difficulties surrounding notions of authenticity, especially with regard to media representations of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity.

Apart from campaigns around casting and critiques of specific media

texts or intrafandom practices, nonwhite fans also engage creatively with texts that do not have space for them. Although much has been written on the subversive power of fan works that engage with gender identities and queer sexualities (particularly in the case of slash fan works), there is a relative silence around the ways in which fans attempt to interrupt other aspects of hegemonic media texts, particularly those of race. I turn now to some of these creative practices—specifically meta, head canons, and racebending—in order to show how the operations of sincerity affect these individual negotiations. These productions often operate in the interstices of what is considered official fan work and are therefore often overlooked.

Meta, Head Canons, and Racebending

An undertheorized mode of fan production has been the meta essay,

simply referred to as “meta” in fan spaces. This is odd because the meta essay itself has been a mainstay of fan production for many years, though its status has remained contentious. For instance, the decision to allow meta to be hosted on the AO3 fan work archive website in 2013 sparked considerable debate, with some fans claiming that it would clog up space that should be for purely fictional productions (OTW Board 2013). Meta, a notoriously hard category to define, is defined in the same OTW Board post as “nonfictional

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fanworks in all media.” The definition therefore also includes not just textual productions but also meta essays in the shape of fan videos and so on.

Although a slippery term, “meta” has most commonly been used to

describe fan works that comment on issues within a specific media text, on fandom, or on cross-fandom phenomena. These can be in the form of critiques around issues of gender and sexuality, information pertaining to world building, character studies, or even meditations on particular relationships, canonical or not. Meta, especially that produced from a critical standpoint, is also sometimes classified as wank. Meta pieces can be influential within fandom spaces, sometimes leading to a popularization of a particular characterization or an aspect of world building, leading to a blurring of any strict fiction/nonfiction divide.

This enmeshing of fiction and nonfiction, critique and narrative is also

influenced by the digital nature of its circulation and by changes in platform. It is useful here to refer to Paul Booth’s (2009) term “narractivity,” which he defines as “the process by which communal interactive action constructs and develops a coherent narrative database” (373). Booth’s analysis is focused on the operations of fan wikis (websites designed to host communal content creation) maintained by fans of television shows, which are more structured platforms than the more scattered meta essays I reference here. However, the process whereby fans use these digital forums and their inherent interactive nature to both “parse apart and reform back together an already extant media text’s narrative” can also be seen in the more informal and dispersed circulation of meta arguments (373). Particularly interesting are the ways nonwhite fans “parse apart” the media texts and fan works that erase them; they work within and against the various authenticities pertaining to minority racial, cultural, ethnic, and religious identities.

The notion of head canon must be addressed. Head canon is often

marked off from meta in fan discourse, but both share several common features. Head canon, like meta, works within a framework of metanarrativity. Head canons are, as the term suggests, any interpretations of a character or aspect of world building in a text by an individual fan that does not have a concrete canonical basis—that is, it’s in the fan’s head. Although the practice of coming up with head canons has been a bedrock of fandom activity—what is fan fiction other than the extension of such imaginings?—more recently the practice of sharing them has become more common, mostly thanks to the Tumblr format, which encourages informal short-form writing that can

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gain a large audience. Head canons are usually formed when information is scarce about a particular character; it often takes the form of imagining a backstory encompassing anything from parental influences to sexual encounters. However, they do usually draw from some kind of textual evidence (as do meta essays), and although head canons are usually more informal and less concerned with proving a point than meta, they also may inform creative fan works, again slipping in between the fiction/nonfiction divide.

As a result of these traits, as well as the fact that they can be written

quickly and do not have any particular stylistic requirements, head canons are increasingly a way for fans to enlarge the metatext of fandom itself, especially in aspects that are underrepresented in other forms of fan work like fan fiction. This is seen particularly in head canons concerning the possible sexualities and gender identities for characters beyond the cisgender hetero-, homo-, or bisexual spectrum. One of my respondents, a young Muslim Canadian fan, recounted the way that head canons allowed her to negotiate between her fannishness and her religious identity, two aspects that are often seen in opposition to each other: I didn’t, until last year, feel comfortable bringing my religion into any fandom I was a part of. Last year I wrote “Imagine A Muslim Witch” [a head canon based on Harry Potter, which has now been deleted] which opened up a whole new avenue for me where I felt safe talking about the intersectionality of race, religion, and fandom. It’s weird, because I’d been following people who’d done that for years, but none of them were Muslims with a strong presence as Muslims.

Then, because a lot of the fandoms I was most involved in had a huge

LGBTQ perspective (shipping and representation of Other Than Straight), I felt like I’d be attacked for being involved in anything that was “against my religion” by people who saw me as a hypocrite, a liar, perverted, or weak.

It’s still complicated. I ignore the exceedingly rare anon hate I get and

decide to like what I like through reblogging and perhaps commenting in the tags where I can easily be ignored. It’s rare that I say anything that’s specifically from my perspective as a Muslim WOC, and rare that it’s a post in itself unconnected to a graphic, edit, or series of comments. (Respondent 14, interview with author, 2015)

This response is striking. The head canon referred to is a specific

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imaginative intervention that attempts to negotiate a space for a different set of cultural relations within the canonical Anglo-Christian traditions of Hogwarts. Despite J.  K. Rowlings’s inclusion of some nonwhite characters in the original text, such as Padma and Parvati Patil, these remain divorced from their individual cultural contexts. In opposition to this, the head canon is explicitly out of place in Hogwarts: it dwells, for example, on how a Muslim witch might come to an agreement with the house elves about getting food during Ramadan. By showing this to be an individual negotiation—and not something that would be considered by the school itself—the head canon shows itself as self-consciously othered even as it engages with the story world. The narrative’s monocultural ethos is therefore revealed to be explicitly discriminatory. These kinds of imaginative interruptions of normative Anglo-centric story worlds are unusual to find in larger pieces of fan fiction, perhaps because the kinds of otherness they introduce are not as appealing to fan readers.

Further, the response also shows how other interstices of identity (par-

ticularly queer sexualities) might be a source of conflict for such fans. Jackson’s (2005) idea of sincerity seems apt here, as the respondent is continually renegotiating between the scripts that govern her raced and religious identity without either disregarding their potentialities or rejecting their limitations. Head canons as imaginative safe spaces for nonwhite fans to explore the various interstices of identity therefore merit further investigation. This is an especially vital aspect, as they are also increasingly used to adapt and showcase the practice of racebending, a form of creative pushback that displays the intermingling of aspects of both meta and head canon to create a new form of creative and critical fan work.

Racebending, which I turn to now, has a complex history, both within

and outside fandom. Commenting on this practice, Sarah N. Gatson and Robin Anne Reid (2012) refer to Mica Pollack’s (2004) formulation of it as a “a strategy of questioning the validity of race categories to describe human diversity even while keeping race categories strategically available for the analysis of local and national racial inequalities” (¶ 2.3). Within fandom, they observe that it refers to a casting choice wherein a role with a particular racial or ethnic identity ascribed to it is given to a performer not of that race or ethnicity without changing the actual script, or when a role’s race or ethnicity is changed (reflected in scripting details) to match that of a chosen actor. For Gatson and Reid, although this use of racebending may refer to a situation

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in which an actor of color performs an originally white character, it also “has a more negative connotation wherein a character of color—indeed, often an actual person—has their race/ethnicity changed, and then that character/ role is portrayed by a white actor” (¶ 2.3).

Although it is certainly possible for the term to be used both ways, an

observation of fandom practice, following the establishment of Racebending.com in particular, seems to have shifted the term to the former definition, not just referring to official casting decisions but also the practice whereby fans come up with dream casts, or, in the case of texts already in filmic form, recasts so as to make them more diverse. A similar (often intersecting) practice is genderbending—that is, casting that puts more women into popular texts (Baker 2016). Although genderbending is a popular practice within fan fiction, racebending is more common in visual media like fan art, and, particularly on Tumblr, photo and GIF sets. GIF sets are made up of GIF (graphic interchange format) files that allow for a few seconds of video footage to be endlessly looped. This allows for a new style of narrative to be deployed in which fans poach footage from various sources to build stories. These can be in the form of credit montages that introduce various characters in their reimagined forms, or they can contain exposition about the world building of a particular reimagined universe in the form of a GIF fic. Commenting on their use, Nistasha Perez (2013) observes that the GIF fic is a form of fan work that works to maximize the Tumblr format. She notes, “The number [of GIFs] is enough to tell snippets of the story. . . . With a limited number of gifs, exposition and set up are often explained in an attached author’s note or left to the reader’s imaginations” (152).

This deliberate interruption and reformulation of what specific charac-

ters are supposed to look like is a powerful tool that may be used to undercut the default reading process whereby a character is assumed to be white, even in the face of considerable textual evidence to the contrary. This is only reinforced when the descriptions of a character are more ambiguous. For instance, when the first film of the Hunger Games trilogy (adapted from Suzanne Collins’s book series) was filmed in 2012 and Amandla Stenberg was cast as the character of Rue, the reaction of some fans followed this same logic of having assumed whiteness. These fans unleashed a barrage of tweets following their first viewing of the film that were shockingly vitriolic in terms of their racism. A repeated refrain was the “unbelievable” fact that an “innocent” young girl (as Rue is described in the text) could be played by

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a Black actress (Holmes 2012). In fact, however, Rue’s description in the book suggests that she is unambiguously raced as nonwhite, which shows how powerfully the assumption of whiteness in popular cultural texts operates. This example also shows, once again, how the assumed subversiveness of fan spaces (even media fan spaces) must never be left uninterrogated. The Hunger Games is, after all, a text that is led by a woman character (Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence—who is also somewhat whitewashed), and its narrative foregrounds resistance to an oppressive social order. It could therefore be assumed that its fans would welcome more diversity in the supporting cast, which would only build on the text’s clear metaphors dealing with institutionalized and racialized injustice (Pharr et al. 2012; Heit 2015). The fact that this did not happen, and that the appearance of Rue on screen caused such a degree of backlash, shows how deeply issues of race, especially Blackness, still mediate such spaces. This phenomenon was also seen in the backlash against the multiracial casting of Ava DuVernay’s 2018 adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time (Glines 2017).

The practice of racebending within this context, in which characters

(both those ambiguously described as nonwhite in the original text as well those who are canonically white) are deliberately rendered by fans in full and varying color, becomes a political act of resistance and a talking back to powerful discourses that coercively dictate what kinds of narratives in Western popular cultural texts are allowable for nonwhite characters. Although fan practices that inject queer sexualities into ostensibly straight texts have been central to examinations of media fan spaces since the inception of fan studies as a discipline, there has been a ringing silence around other resistant practices. Further, racebending in most cases also takes into account other interstices of identity, including queer sexualities, which are often erased in the most popular white character–centric pairings. I now turn to an example to expand on this practice.

The Curious Case of Newt Scamander

It is well documented that the Harry Potter franchise spawned one of

the most widespread and powerful media fan communities on the internet (Brown 2007; Tosenberger 2008a; Schwabach 2009; Black and Steinkuehler 2009). Indeed, these communities are credited with shaping the way that

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online media fandom functions in foundational ways as a whole generation of fans came of age while negotiating their online identities. Harry Potter fans continue to argue over plot points and produce fan work on newer platforms, thus keeping the fandom alive.

One of the issues that has continued to concern some fans is the lack

of racial diversity in the Harry Potter franchise’s books and movies. While J. K. Rowling’s use of blood purity as a metaphor for racism is clear, it is disassociated from real-world racial power dynamics through the casting of white actors (Horne 2010). This has also been questioned by fans themselves, especially with regard to the replacement of Jennifer Smith (a Black actress), who initially played the character of Lavender Brown, with Jessie Cave (a white actress) at the same time the character was given an extended role (Velazquez 2013). In the realm of fan work, there has also been a small but sustained popularization of racebending the main characters of the books, particularly Hermione Granger. These take inspiration from the fact that Hermione is never explicitly described as white in the books, with her defining features being her prominent teeth and her untamable, frizzy hair. Writing about this phenomenon, Alanna Bennet (2015), a biracial fan, notes: As a biracial girl growing up in a very white city, I found myself especially attaching to the allegory of Harry Potter’s blood politics. In middle school, when I was confronting that there were people out there who’d call me “n****r,” I thought back to Hermione being called “mudblood” and harassed by teacher and students alike. I related to her deeply, but like with so much of what I watched and read, I couldn’t see myself in Hermione. . . . In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Hermione is introduced with a description of her bushy brown hair and her large teeth. There’s nothing there to indicate she didn’t look just like me, yet I always pictured a white face under that bushy head. I always pictured her not-me.

She recalls that this experience only changed when she was introduced

to racebent versions of Hermione. It was then that she finally found, “for the first time, I was seeing Hermione’s subtext brought out into text. . . . It was beautiful, it made sense.” It seems clear in these engagements that what fans are expressing is their approximations of a nonwhite Hermione. This is not a process of authentication because there is no material reality for fans to

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authenticate their head canons against. Rather, they are motivated by a sincerity that the magical universe they invest heavily in should be a diverse one. As Jackson (2005) underlines, “sincerity privileges intent” (17), and in this case, the intent is not sourced from Rowling’s rather circumscribed worldview 4 but from the intent of fan imaginings that refuse to accept a canonical authenticity that leaves them out completely.

Similarly, when Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the newest

filmic iteration of the franchise, was announced in 2013, it was greeted with great excitement. Because Rowling was deeply involved in the project, unlike her limited participation in the filming of the original Harry Potter movies, some fans thought that this might mean that a more diverse cast of characters could be in the offing. The film project was to star the character of Newt Scamander, a magical biologist who is a wholly new character and thus theoretically open to any interpretation with regard to his race and sexuality. The announcement of the project led to a frenzy of speculation in the mainstream press regarding the casting of the character. It is key to note that it was predominately white male actors linked to the role, including Nicholas Hoult, Tom Hiddleston, and Benedict Cumberbatch (A. Sims 2013; Erlikh 2013).

Within fandom spaces, in September 2013, Racebending.com issued a

call for head canons for Newt that would preemptively imagine the character as nonwhite. Dear fandom that is more artistically talented than me,

Please make .gif sets of Newt Scamander, a recent Hufflepuff graduate

and black Brit from the Ministry of Magic Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. He’s assigned across the pond to New York to investigate a case of magical sewer alligators and gets brought into the fold of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

JK Rowling: I dare you to demand that WB cast an actor of color for Newt

Scamander. (“Headcanon Newt Scamander” 2013)

The call was answered by numerous fan artists and GIF set makers. One

fan, alterocentrist (2013), chose British actor Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Newt. This post was one of the first and was reblogged with additional commentary as other fans jumped at the chance to craft mininarratives about what a story about a nonwhite wizard suddenly thrust into a United States of the

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1920s might encompass: “Somehow his hair is perfect for an adventurous, nerdy wizard, chasing magical creatures through the back alleys of New York, wearing a weird mix of Muggle clothing and wizard robes in a halfassed attempt to blend in. ‘Trust me, I’m an expert!’ he says, chasing a chimera down the sewers, wielding a knobby stick” (meariver 2013). This communal layering of fan art with narrative commentary has long been observed in media fan communities, but Tumblr posts have the potential to be shared much more easily. This operationalization of fan practices, so far seen as rather neutral and personal (the very idea of head canon seems to imply a particularity of a single imagination), into a potential tool for interrupting normative interpretive paradigms within fandom spaces that reinforce white privilege is thus potentially a powerful political act.

A further buttressing of canonical material in support of a nonwhite

Newt Scamander was discovered in a mention in Rowling’s additional short snippets, which she published to the fan site Pottermore.com in 2014. In a newspaper report, supposedly written by journalist Rita Skeeter, Newt’s grandson, Rolf Scamander, is described as swarthy (“Dumbledore’s Army Reunites” 2014). Fans eagerly seized on this new information, which produced a slew of meta essays on the potential implications of the term “swarthy.” One such meditation, backed with citations, pointed out that the word’s etymology indicated a dark-skinned individual and that it had been used in English literature as racially coded. The fan also analyzed the text as written by Rita Skeeter, an unsavory individual who did not comment on any other character’s physical appearance. Taking into account this evidence, the post concluded, By having Rita Skeeter unnecessarily mention Rolf’s skin color using a semi-pejorative term, Rita’s established persona as a skeevy, exploitative journalist adds weight to the argument that the description of Rolf is racially coded .  .  . TL;DR: Rita Skeeter is an exploitative journalist who isn’t above using outdated language to link a person’s skin color to his character and Rolf Scamander is definitely a POC and so is Newt Scamander (because if Rolf is canonically POC then why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to have Newt Scamander be a POC as well and cast Nathan Stewart-Jarrett in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them?). (singelisilverslippers 2014)

The intermingling of meta essays and head canons can thus be seen

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in support of a racebent characterization that not only argues for a further diversity in potential casting decisions but also preemptively makes space for such characters in fantasy narratives like those of the Harry Potter universe by drawing support from an (inhospitable) canon. These fan works were being created with the knowledge that in all likelihood the role would still be given to a white actor. In fact, this almost certainty gave the fans more urgency in showing how their claim to the canon was as legitimate as the more mainstream websites, which continued to include only white actors in speculated cast lineups.

Once in circulation, these visually arresting pieces of fan art, GIF sets,

and GIF fics provided a powerful alternative to those fans who might not have thought about these aspects of the text, thus building support behind the idea. By doing so, they were also laying the groundwork for potential criticism of the official casting choice. When Eddie Redmayne was cast as Newt Scamander in November 2015, there was an immediate and significant pushback against yet another all-white cast—so much so that both the executive producer of the movie, David Heyman, and Rowling had to respond to the criticism. They did so disappointingly, with Heyman claiming that the movie would include nonwhite characters in an “organic way,” which most probably indicates they would be background characters, and with Rowling issuing vague assurances that there would be nonwhite characters at some point in the proposed three-part series (Heyman quoted in Hibberd 2015). This has led to further disappointment among fans who had, for perhaps the first time, been able to imagine a magical universe that included them. As one respondent put it, “It started very innocuously—but as I spent more time in fandom, I realized there were many ways in which characters were being raced, even if the canon text didn’t see them that way. That was a wonderful moment—somehow, I’d never really considered racebending, even though postcolonialism has made a huge impact on my life—so racebending was something I learnt in fandom” (Hena, interview with author, 2014). There are multiple ways of engaging theoretically with these creative practices, but as pointed out by Hena, the synergy in these acts of fandom praxis indicates a return to my earlier framing of these fandom spaces as postcolonial cybercultural arenas. These acts of laying claim to canonical texts that fashion restrictive narrative universes is distinctly contrapuntal. Said (1993) proposes the idea of a contrapuntal reading in response to criticism that his

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theorizations around the operations of imperialism foreclosed any possibility of resistance. This idea was drawn from Western classical music in which, according to Said, the counterpoint section allowed for various themes to play off one another, with only provisional priority being given to any one in turn. A contrapuntal reading is engaged in uncovering the “submerged but crucial presence of empire in canonical texts” (Said quoted in Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999, 93). For Said, in “practical terms . . . the point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (1993, 66–67). As Geeta Chowdhry (2007), quoting Said (1993), points out, It is possible that Said’s elaborations on contrapuntal reading could be interpreted by some as a plea for an incipient liberal or postmodern plurality in which multiple voices jostle for space, and no voice is privileged. Such an interpretation of contrapuntality would be missing the point. Said’s plea for a contrapuntal reading is not to valorize plurality, rather it is a plea for “worlding” the texts, institutions and practices, for historicizing them, for interrogating their sociality and materiality, for paying attention to the hierarchies and the power-knowledge nexus embedded in them, and for recuperating a “non-coercive and nondominating knowledge.” (105)

Contrapuntal reading is thus theorized as an act of (re)reading, of mak-

ing space for narratives and subjectivities that have no room in canonical texts specifically around lines of supposed historical fact. However, this is not to frame it as uncomplicatedly resistant, as the lines of interpretation must take into account processes of imperialism and decolonization, then register the continual interplay between both in texts produced in contemporary neoliberal conditions.

Racebending is contrapuntal in that it extends the metatext of fan-

dom both in terms of the canonical texts that force out the possibility of a nonwhite Newt Scamander entirely and in terms of the dominant fandom practices that reinforce those exclusions. Further, Tumblr, where these posts are hosted, allows for the possibility of their wide circulation, with individual fans adding on further metatexts, leading to a polyphonic engagement with the original critique. By inviting and allowing multiple versions of what a

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black Brit wizard might look like, these posts attempt to engage with the same authenticity–sincerity dynamic that I have already discussed.

The process of historicization is crucial here as well. To refer back to

Heyman’s defense of casting of an all-white group of actors for the film, he argued that this casting was based on historical accuracy, as the time period of the movie (New York in the 1920s) was one of racial segregation (Heyman quoted in Hibberd 2015). This is the well-worn strategy of those who wish to defend the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood productions. Ironically, these claims are based on a violent and systematic erasure of nonwhite peoples from histories where they were very much present. These erasures are effected first on an institutional level, with educational curriculums in the United States glossing over the presence and contributions of marginalized individuals (Jacobs 2006; Leahey 2010; Taylor and Guyver 2012). The effects of these erasures are then compounded by Hollywood’s whitewashing of these narratives in the sphere of popular culture (Toplin 1996; Vera and Gordon 2003). In the case of Heyman’s comments, they fall flat on two fronts: not only was 1920s New York historically diverse and multicultural, with segregation affecting some arenas but not others, but also the very idea of insisting on historical accuracy in a film that will also deal with mythical creatures like unicorns is rather suspect (Gatewood 1990; Frazier and Margai 2010).

This clash between competing and legitimized histories is also present

in Rowling’s (2016) series of expansion pieces about the magical universe of Harry Potter, History of Magic in North America, which are set in the United States. In this case, historical accuracy is clearly not a concern, as Rowling appropriates many concepts from Native American cultural history without paying attention to or respecting how this mythologizes and distorts living cultures. As Adrienne K. (2015), a Native American scholar and blogger, points out, this has harmful effects: But we’re not magical creatures, we’re contemporary peoples who are still here, and still practice our spiritual traditions, traditions that are not akin to a completely imaginary wizarding world (as badass as that wizarding world is). In a fact I quote often on this blog, it wasn’t until 1978 that we as Native peoples were even legally allowed to practice our religious beliefs or possess sacred objects like eagle feathers. Up until that point, there was a coordinated effort through assimilation policies, missionary systems, and cultural

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genocide to stamp out these traditions, and with them, our existence as Indigenous peoples. We’ve fought and worked incredibly hard to maintain these practices and pass them on.

So I get worried thinking about the message it sends to have “indige-

nous magic” suddenly be associated with the Harry Potter brand and world. Because the other piece I deal with on this blog is the constant commodification of our spiritual practices too. There is an entire industry of plastic shamans selling ceremonies, or places like Urban Outfitters selling “smudge kits” and fake eagle feathers. As someone who owns a genuine time-turner, I know that marketing around Harry Potter is a billion dollar enterprise, and so I get nervous thinking about the marketing piece. American fans are going to be super stoked at the existence of a wizarding school on this side of the pond, and I’m sure will want to snatch up anything related to it—which I really hope doesn’t include Native-inspired anything.

This response points to the real imperializing power of popular cultural

narratives as they are being engaged with in the contemporary moment, which affects individuals both within and outside geographical nodes of imperial power through the operation of neoliberal capitalism. These effects are being seen within fandom communities—Adrienne K. identifies herself first and foremost as a Potter fan—and therefore practices like racebending become even more critical to how fans engage with these hegemonic discourses. Such practices interrupt such whitewashed and appropriative reimaginings of history and popular narrative through their interventions.

However, racebending is also a fraught enterprise: its oppositional

stance often provokes critique from participants in larger fandom spaces who are content to embrace the metaphors of racism and extend them unproblematically in their own fan works without engaging in a consideration of the real-world discrimination they parallel and reflect. Some fans contend that boosting such posts has become a way for fandom to engage with the need for diversity in fan works on the surface only, without truly, concretely engaging with the characters of color who are already present in the narratives. To refer again to The Force Awakens controversy, the popularity of racebending must be seen as happening in the same space as the almost inevitable sidelining of characters of color, regardless of their prominence in the source texts. I do not wish to diminish the power of racebending as a

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practice, but it must not be seen as functioning as some kind of proof of the progressiveness of media fandom spaces in light of other microaggressions faced by nonwhite fans—microaggressions that I examine in more detail in the next chapter.

Finally, the colorism that can be seen in fan casting practices, where

lighter-skinned actors are often seen as more popular and attractive, should also be kept in mind when examining these patterns within white-centric fan spaces. The operation of colorism and antiblackness within broadly defined nonwhite communities, located inside the United States and other multicultural societies, operates in diverse and complex ways, intersecting with the axes of gender and sexuality as well. These intracommunity lines of discrimination are also enmeshed in the workings of neocolonialism across South Asian countries like India and across African nations like Kenya, which support booming industries around skin-lightening products (Banks 1999; Hunter 2007; Del Giudice and Yves 2002; Glenn 2008).

Conclusion

It has been my aim here to trace the multiple strategies that nonwhite

fans use in order to engage in fannish spaces that are not always friendly to them or their concerns. This is not to treat these communities or individuals as monolithic; rather, I want to tease out some common threads from my respondent data and from larger trends in fannish spaces. My analysis has focused on mostly successful interventions of nonwhite fans in fannish spaces, but these efforts remain circumscribed by the overwhelming focus on white characters as the subject of fan works, particularly fan fiction. Media fandom remains an inhospitable space for nonwhite characters, which inevitably get sidelined and erased even on the rare occasions that they have significant roles in canonical texts. Fans who would like better representation or who push back against the dominant view that media fandom spaces are subversive and liberatory by default because of their willingness to explore queer sexualities inevitably face a backlash or are continually told to write it themselves. My respondents pointed out the alienation that such statements effected, framing the exploration of white characters as the default or something natural and putting the burden of writing all other characters onto fans who marked themselves off in some way. The fact that

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this alienation is described as being productive of a loneliness (the seeming antithesis of what fandom participation is imagined to be) also points to the difference in experiences that are often glossed over.

I now turn to an analysis of the structure and functioning of fan work

communities, drawing from their historical theorizations as communitarian spaces that are self-reflexive and responsive to intertextual exchanges. My central argument remains that contemporary theorizations about how media fandom communities work and produce fan fiction are fundamentally stymied as a result of their failure to address whiteness as a racialized identity. These approaches in effect neutralize the whiteness of the texts they examine and therefore mark any considerations of the operation of racial identity as always already in an othered space.

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Recalibration Necessary, Mr. Spock RACE AND THE DYNAMICS OF MEDIA FANDOM

In this chapter I will examine how race and racial identity have figured (or failed to figure) in broad-based theoretical considerations of how media fan communities function. In doing so, I wish to highlight, following Wanzo’s (2015) perceptive intervention, that these considerations have failed to take account of the effect of racial identity not exclusively as a result of oversight or lack of awareness on the part of researchers. In fact, I posit that these formulations have had to purposely set aside race as an influencing factor so that they may continue to remain stable. In this formulation, racial identity becomes an additional element that may be overlooked or footnoted—an exception to the rule in the otherwise progressive liberal spaces of fandom. To disrupt this assumption, I have already argued in Chapter 1 that nonwhite fans have always been present in these spaces, even as recorded histories have had no place for them. Chapters 2 and 3 build a case for contemporary media fandom communities to be seen as an example of a postcolonial cyberspace. I will now investigate how both the presence and actions of such fans have always discomfited foundational ideas about media fandom, which include fandom as an interpretive community, the structuring of intracommunity conflict, the relationship of fan work relationships to canon, and the function of fan writing in narrative universes. I begin by considering how racial identity has been theorized to operate in these contexts up to the present moment.

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Race in Fandom Studies Today

The place of racial identity in fandom studies at the contemporary

moment is at once the topic of considerable discussion and considerable silence. The ways in which the role of whiteness as a structuring force in media fandom, as it is most commonly conceived of today, is repeatedly footnoted in favor of the supposedly more relevant issues of gender and sexuality. However, this is not to say that the importance of studying racial identity as an influencing factor in these communities has not been acknowledged. This absence was noted as early as Fiske’s (1992) influential study of fans and their affective economies, and it continues to be registered as troubling in overviews, anthologies, and keynote addresses. In their survey of the field nearly twenty years after Fiske’s study, Kristina Busse and Jonathan Gray (2011) must still argue: Fan studies has proven a powerful lens through which we can examine the practices of power through media transmission and reception in the West, so let us use fan studies to examine similar processes internationally. Let us also use fan studies to examine minority racial and ethnic communities within the West. If the middleclass white American posting comments about an American network drama on Television without Pity is rapidly becoming the hegemonically normative fan in some accounts of fandom, a global and racially sensitive fan studies could further help to destabilize this odd norm, returning fan studies’ focus to issues of power. (439)

As I noted in Chapter 2, this call has been partly answered by the grow-

ing focus on transnational fandoms in which the source text is non-Western and often in languages other than English (Punathambekar 2007; McLelland 2009; Chin and Morimoto 2013; Lyan and Levkowitz 2015; Madrid-Morales and Lovric 2015; Kustritz 2015). Further, although there has been no sustained or book-length consideration of the role of racial identity in media fandom spaces, I would like to consider the shorter interventions that have brought attention to this gap. I have already noted the power of Wanzo’s (2015) critique of the field, which points to several ways in which the specific relationships that African American audiences have had with popular media

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contribute to current models of fan studies. The gap in genealogy that Wanzo points to is also seen in the differentiation between the field of television studies, which has seen some considerations of specific viewership demographics, such as Black audiences in edited collections such as Watching while Black (Smith-Shomade 2013), and the field of media fan studies, which conceives of the individual fan in a more directly participatory model. Additionally, although scholars have repeatedly examined the politics of racial identity in the practices of viewing and reading popular media, these studies have not located these individuals as participatory fans (Bobo 1995; hooks 1996; Rodríguez 2003; H. Gray 2004, 2005). Recently, however, there has been some development in this area, notably with Kirsten Warner’s (2014, 2015a, 2015b) studies on Black women fans and audiences. Warner does not concentrate on participatory activities like the creation of fan works, but her observations concerning the strategies Black women audiences use while articulating their affect and pleasure in these texts are nonetheless crucial interventions in the ways these are more broadly conceived.

When the specific field of media fandom studies is considered, the

studies on nonwhite fandom are mostly structured as discrete categories concerned with non-US/UK–based media texts such as the Bollywood, anime, and K-pop industries (Madrid-Morales and Lovric 2015; Newitz 1994; Punathambekar 2007). I discussed the intersections of these concerns with formulations of fandom activism in Chapter 3, but here I would like to register studies such as Lopez (2012) as well. Once again, broader theorizations about the functioning of fandom activism are only nuanced with a discussion of racial identity when it is explicitly foregrounded by the text, in this case Avatar: The Last Airbender. This is also seen in the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on “Race and Ethnicity in Fandom” edited by Sarah N. Gatson and Robyn Anne Reid (2011).

I now turn to a related aspect of my already expressed discomfort

around the theorization of (undifferentiated) fans as marginalized figures. This positioning of white fans as disempowered elides their retention of considerable privilege within institutionalized structures. Notably, this has led to the almost complete erasure of the position of nonwhite male fans within the power structures that delineate fandom. How do charges of feminization and overattachment function with regard to stereotypes around Black masculinity (overaggression) and Asian American masculinity (desexualization),

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to name just a few exceptions? While this has been considered in terms of similar gendered and racialized stereotypes around the geek and the nerd in terms of technocultural access, current fan studies theoretical models leave no room for these outliers; whiteness is once again reinscribed as the norm (Eglash 2002). Benjamin Woo’s 2018 book, Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, goes some way in addressing this gap, but there is much ground still left to cover.

Robin Anne Reid’s (2012) call for further diversification also underlines

the whiteness of fan studies’ genealogy. She notes that in the aftermath of Racefail ’09, “As an aca-fan, I can point to numerous posts, challenges, fiction writing festivals, and carnivals that do anti-racist work. The lack of intersectional scholarship that moves beyond the default ‘white’ fan or, in some cases, ‘the woman fan’ to consider multiple axes of identities in fan studies is clear” (183). Although this kind of fan work exists and is important, it also sums up the difficult position in which nonwhite fans who point out the problematic aspects of fandom spaces find themselves: their fan work is automatically classified as “anti-racist work” that again limits its audience and marks it off as something that is concerned with social justice politics rather than pleasure. This may seem an odd distinction to make because so much of fandom explicitly declares its progressive politics. Nonetheless, it is raised repeatedly as vocal nonwhite fans are asked to stop spoiling everyone’s fun with their activism. I will take this thread up in more detail when I discuss my respondents’ discussion of the place and meaning of escapism in their fandom experiences later on in this chapter. However, any fan work that focuses on nonwhite characters is often classified automatically into the category of duty fic. This has the effect of further reinforcing the idea that the only way these characters could possibly be the focus of fan work is in the context of a special interest festival that individuals take part in to feel good about themselves.

Dominique Deirdre Johnson (2015) discusses the misogyny and anti-

blackness present in The Walking Dead (2010–) fandom centered around the character of Michonne (Danai Gurai). Commenting specifically on the ways in which science fiction fan communities interact with the archetypes and the narratives that nonwhite characters signify, Johnson notes, Representationally, we see POC as stock, archetypal figures whose primary purpose is to either forward the story arcs of white protagonists or as comic

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relief. This sidelining of POC stories and perspectives can be reflected in SF community practices that emerge as suppressive, oppressive politics. As such, these spaces have routinely been deemed hostile to POC who attempt to participate and engage in the imaginative worldmaking processes that are central to fandom’s informal philosophy of communal creation as a key tenet of SF’s ethos. (266)

I will now expand on the ways that the “imaginative worldmaking pro-

cesses” that have been conceived of as central to media fandom productivity are, as Johnson also maintains, far from neutral.

Fandom Algorithms and Racial Identity

Lisa Nakamura (2013) coined the term “glitch racism” to tackle the ques-

tion of why racism in online spaces is felt to be endemic to the technological platform itself, leading to strictures such as “never read the comments” on online articles and blog posts. A common framing to explain this phenomenon is that of the “greater internet fuckwad theory,” first coined by the web comic Penny Arcade (2004), which posits that the anonymity and freedom allowed by such platforms encourages people who otherwise lead normal lives to express their worst impulses. Referencing this postulation, Nakamura points out that racism is seen to be a glitch in the system that otherwise should work to promote greater connectivity: Racism is regarded within Internet culture as spam, noise, and trash: as a digital artifact, in the purely technical sense: when we see big blocky pixels in our VR worlds, feature phones, or throttled “streaming” videos that stutter or refuse to stream, we are forcibly reminded of the network’s limits—it’s material. . . . In other words, everyday online racism is a “glitch” or malfunction of a network designed to broadcast a signal, a signal that is highjacked or polluted by the pirate racist.

Nakamura points out that this construction allows internet users to see

the operation of racism in online spaces as something outside their control— and indeed as something outside themselves. Although Nakamura is discussing the more overt examples of online racism, I use this useful construction as a base for my own technosocial neologism: the fandom algorithm.

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By using the phrase “fandom algorithm,” I refer to the structures that are

seen to order the workings of media fandom, both in terms of communitarian etiquettes and technical strategies that involve fannish digital infrastructure like archiving fan works and organizational strategies such as tagging. Fandom algorithms are aligned to both the “the imaginative worldmaking processes that are central to fandom’s informal philosophy of communal creation,” which Johnson (2015, 266) references, as well as the digital building blocks that are common to many fandom spaces. In Chapter 1 I examined the ways in which these digital environments, considered to be neutral, have affected the ways in which fandom digital histories have been recorded, and in Chapters 2 and 3 I examined how changes in these platforms in a more dialogic direction have promoted discussion of issues of racial identity. Here I examine how other digital structures in fandom work to at once foreground and dismiss the uneven treatment of nonwhite characters.

These apparatuses are seen to operate independently and without

bias toward any particular individual fan or character. Any racism observed to interrupt their workings is seen as a glitch—an interruption of a system that otherwise works smoothly toward promoting the formation of safe spaces, the exchange of material and nonmaterial fannish squee, the pushback against hegemonic canon, and the lessening of friction among groups in opposition. Another effect of this formulation is to see the roots of these glitches, when they occur, as part of a larger systemic malfunction that fandom participants cannot influence. This allows troubling patterns of behavior to be deflected outward, onto flawed popular cultural texts or onto individuals who act in bad faith against fandom etiquettes, thus allowing the core liberal nature of media fandom spaces to operate unquestioningly.

To interrupt this process of deflection and deferral, Nakamura (2013)

asks, “What if, in the spirit of media archaeology, we understood online racism not as a glitch but as part of the signal? What if we paid attention to racist comments with the same intensity that we do the rest of the content?” In the spirit of these queries, each of the categories I will now take up—fan fiction communities as functioning intertextually, fan work and the possibilities of subversion, the relationship of fan work to canon, fandom and the uses of escapism, and the digital organizing structures of fandom—contributes to my theoretical framework as examples of fandom algorithms. In the following analysis, I strive to pay attention to all the times that racial identity

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has caused the algorithms of fandom to glitch. What do these repeated moments of failure to reach the promised potentialities of media fandom culture with regard to nonwhite fans and characters tell us about this technosocial environment? They reveal not the interruption of the signal but the flaws in the signal itself.

Algorithm 1: Fan Fiction Communities as Intertextual

The foundational texts of media fandom laid the groundwork for seeing

fans, particularly media fans, as part of interpretive communities that worked to expand a restrictive canon in various ways, most notably in the form of slash fan fiction (Russ 1985; Lamb and Veith 1986; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1992). Jenkins’s (1992) formulation was perhaps the most influential, with his location of such fans in a fundamentally disempowered position with regard to the producers of such texts and his emphasis on the communitarian aspect of such interventions: “Fan culture finds that utopian dimension within popular culture a site for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive to the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment, most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community” (282). This formulation has been questioned since then, most notably by Matt Hills (2002) and Cornel Sandvoss (2005), who point to the importance of also paying attention to the fan as an individual, with changing positions and investments in texts. Jenkins has also shifted his focus from more subcultural forms of media fandom to the ways in which such practices are evident in more mainstream avenues (Jenkins 2006a, 2006b; Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013). There has also been some interrogation around the concept of antifans, who are motivated by an intense dislike of a text, so as to diversify models of attachment that privilege love for a source text as a primary motivating factor (J. Gray 2005; Alters 2007). Further, the conflicts within fan communities that do organize around Jenkins’s initial ideas of affiliation and friendship have also come under scrutiny, mainly in terms of levels of appropriate attachment and intrafan policing of behavior (Zubernis and Larsen 2012; Stanfill 2013; Busse 2013a; B. Jones 2015). This can be seen as in line with the larger pushback against the first wave of fan studies that Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss (2007a) term the “fandom is beautiful” phase.

However, in terms of fan work itself, particularly fan fiction, the need

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for an audience and a community has remained a touchstone, even when conflicts are investigated, as has the impulse to foreground fan fiction as intertextual, as something in dialogue with both canon and the fan texts that have been created in relationship to it. I have already traced some of these interactions in my discussion of the role of the meta essay and head canon within fan spaces in Chapter 3, but here I would like to expand that consideration outside the specific practice of racebending. Sheenagh Pugh (2005) identifies this intertextuality as key to the analysis of fan fiction, commenting that fan fiction functions within a “complicit audience” that is highly attuned to cues that do not need to be explicitly spelled out. Pugh also identifies the importance of archetypes within fan writing: “The human need for heroes and archetypes does not go away, but their faces change with time, and one avatar takes the place of another” (219). This attraction of fan communities to certain types of characters is something that I will also take up in more detail in a moment.

When Busse and Gray (2011) comment on what makes media fandom

communities different from other groupings that have also come under the umbrella of fandom through the mainstreaming of such activities, they also cite this highly communitarian frame as a distinguishing feature: All these texts and conversations create a fannish space so that fan texts also tend to be intertextual with the fan community in which they are produced and circulated. In a way, they can be seen to respond to all the other texts, all the interpretations and debates. As the internet in particular allows fans to share their work and communicate with one another easily, creative fans often tend to be part of a community. Thus, fans engage in an emotionally invested negotiation not only with the source text they analyze, criticize, and expand, but also with their fan community and its discourses. (435–36)

This intertextuality is also foregrounded in these analyses to point to

the need to see fan fiction and its different iterations in their own specific contexts (Busse and Lothian 2009). This need is partly rooted in an effort to head off the sensationalizing of more explicit genres of fan fiction that often then trigger moral panic in cycles of response–defense. The discourses that circulate in fan communities are indeed a specific context that fan fiction must be placed within, but to characterize these as always shifting, reactive to criticism, and uncertain is also to facilitate the elision of power differentials

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that continue to operate through these shifts. If fandom is an intertextual community, then which texts cause a shift in characterization and in focus, and which texts produce the most impact within these communities must also be examined.

As an example, I will take up the case of the character of Steve Rogers

(Captain America) in the MCU. This character, introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), goes through a period of stasis and is reintroduced to the world seventy years later in The Avengers (2012), followed by Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). He has also appeared in The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), and, most recently, Avengers: Infinity War (2018). His discomfort with the modern world has been the topic of several jokes in these movies, and his initial characterization in fan fiction was driven by this canonical inference. In these fan texts, Steve Rogers is presented as discomfited and confused by a variety of things, most notably technology, the presence of out and proud queer individuals, and the expanded roles that white women and people of color can now occupy in US society.

Unsurprisingly, this was not an iteration that many fans of the charac-

ter agreed with. This prompted highly researched meta essays that pointed to the ways in which his background and upbringing disrupted these stereotypes. These essays pointed to the diverse societal structure of New York through the 1930s and 1940s, to Rogers’s identity as physically disabled for much of his life, to the probability that he was involved in subcultural queer communities, and to the presence of groups that advocated for a wide range of social issues—including the labor union movement—that would also have affected him. They also pointed to the fact that he led a desegregated unit in the events of the first Captain America film as evidence of his comfort with nonwhite individuals. The depth of these meta essays gained a large readership and also had an effect on the kinds of fan fiction narratives surrounding the character (Misra 2014). In fact, the popularization of these tropes was so successful that it even prompted a parody in the LiveJournal community fail-fandomanon, where, as the name implies, various issues in fandom are discussed under conditions of anonymity. In a response to a post that called for “Plots You’re Tired Of in Fanfic,” one anonymous commentator responded with the following summary: Steve and Bucky share an apartment. They are poor, so poor. The temperature is mentioned at least once (either too hot or too cold). The fact that

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they live in Queer Brooklyn and know queerness exists is mentioned. Some extra with an Irish or Italian name or veeeery occasionally a Jewish name is mentioned in passing. No other groups lived in New York in this time. It is a fact. If the person has an accent and just came over and only Steve in all of New York is ever kind to them, even better. If Steve gets beat up trying to defend them from Racists, even better than that. Steve gets beat up in an alley defending at least one marginalized person. Steve is also listed as defending women in bars. Bucky does not work in underpaid alley and bar defense. Bucky works by the docks. Underpaid. But always by the docks. Forever the docks. Brooklyn is 99% docks. Bucky works for Steve. Steve was and/ or is sick. Steve is so incredibly good despite his sickness. Bucky cannot take his goodness. They say at least one movie catchphrase: “pal,” or “to the end of the line,” but probably “punk.” Punk. Punk. Punk. This is a queer phrase, did you know? Bucky maybe dates a girl or seven; who she is and whether they in fact know anyone else in the world is irrelevant. She is maybe a lesbian anyway which we all saw coming because this is Queer Brooklyn. Steve perhaps pines for Bucky but mostly Steve is Good. Bucky thinks about how he is going to afford the rent with all this Depression and also Steve’s sickness.

Porn. (fail-fandomanon 2014)

This hilarious deconstruction is illustrative of the kinds of intertextual-

ity that Busse and Gray (2011) also highlight, where trends in characterization often go through shifts in response to criticism, discussion, and research to become new fandom staples. As Sulagna Misra (2014) concludes in her overview of this trend, “Seeking out these real figures, sorting out these historical details, and mapping progressive politics lends a special aspect to being part of the Captain America fandom—a better understanding of the past through the tangible connection of Steve Rogers.” This does not stop in terms of historical research. It is also seen in fan fiction that places Rogers in the contemporary moment, as is evident in the next excerpt, in which the fan writer uses the point of view of a publicist, Eva (an original character), who is hired for Rogers and who comes in with the same aforementioned assumptions: Worst case scenario, maybe Steve Rogers had come out of the ice with certain old-timey values intact—your standard-issue racist grandpa, only hot. Still, Eva could do damage control. She’d built her name on it. Her first week

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at the firm, a congressman had drunkenly crashed his car into a funeral procession for a local war hero, and she’d gotten him out of the news cycle and into rehab so fast, her boss’s head had spun. If Rogers turned out to be religiously intolerant or homophobic or prone to condescending remarks about women, if he needed constant coaching to adjust to the modern world, well, Eva could deal with it from atop her giant pile of money. She would explain Twitter every day if she needed to. (idiopath-fic-smile 2015)

Of course, the text goes on to overturn all these assumptions; it ends

up with Eva quitting her job in frustration because Rogers is too radical for the contemporary US public to handle. This fits in well with what is seen as the most progressive aspect of fan communities: their transformative and reparative actions. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw (2014) notes, “Along with adventure stories and erotica and short fics where Steve figures out how to work the internet, fans have gone to the trouble of researching WWII-era gay culture and minor New York artists to slot into their fanfics, often forcing modern-era characters to confront their own prejudices.”

Although there is certainly an element of radicalism in interrupting

simplistic views of history, this trend of rewriting also signals a conservative element in fan communities, especially when it is seen in context with what treatment other characters, especially those that occupy actual real-world marginalized identities, receive. In their choice of Rogers as the focal point through which modern-era characters “confront their own prejudices” (as opposed to characters like Sam Wilson or Nick Fury, who are both African American), fan writers sidestep some of the most burning issues in contemporary US society, such as Black Lives Matter.1

It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that the most common situation that

Rogers is placed in to show his progressiveness in fan fiction texts is in his championing of equal rights for queer individuals in the United States. This is not to say that the queer rights movement does not have relevance to nonwhite communities. Rather, placing Rogers at the forefront of that conflict allows fan writers to avoid any intersection of identities that often troubles that movement. For instance, nonwhite queer activists in the United States have been vocal about how the priorities of the queer rights movement has shifted toward the right to marriage through the influence of more wealthy white cisgender gay and lesbian campaigners, as opposed to the problems

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of police violence, homelessness, and incarceration that disproportionately affect queer communities of color (Hutchinson 2000; Bérubá 2001; Puar 2007).

When commenting on this phenomenon, one of my respondents

remarked that it paralleled the 2015 movie Stonewall. In Stonewall, the historical fact that the famous riots, which many see as the starting point of the contemporary queer rights movement in the United States, were led by trans women of color is erased in favor of a completely fictional white cisgender gay male character (Barnes 2015; Ginelle 2015). The movie was rightfully criticized for this erasure, but the director, Roland Emmerich, who is gay, was adamant that the only way of getting viewers to identify with the event was to give them an everyman point-of-view character, which of course translated to cisgender male whiteness. He also maintained that it was a “white event” (Reynolds 2016).

Although fan writers’ iteration of Rogers’s history is a much more

detailed and nuanced leveraging of historical fact and character narrative, their almost exclusive positioning of his character as the only one deeply conscious of social justice issues aligns itself with the same logic. The repeated framing of Rogers as disenfranchised and as occupying a complicated identity with regard to his queerness allows fan writers to critique one aspect of their contemporary social reality while sidelining others that might discomfit them. This strategy has also been remarked on by nonwhite fans in these spaces, who question why it is always Rogers and not Wilson who seems to be exclusively interested in showing his support of these events. They argue that logically, the latter character would be more affected by the endless news cycles about crackdowns on Black activists protesting against police violence and other issues. These fans also draw on canonical evidence to support this characterization: Considering Sam Wilson’s extensive comicbook history as a civil rights activist, I’m gonna need more headcanons about him combatting antiblackness, police brutality and microaggressions.

Like, please give me long in depth meta about Sam participating in ral-

lies and protests, discussing #BlackLivesMatter in press conferences & raising awareness about the discrimination he and other black LGBT+ members face.

Don’t get me wrong: headcanons about Steve participating in social

justice are well and good, but I get a little tired that there’s more meta/ headcanons/etc. of the white male hero battling racism or leading protests

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against antiblack police brutality than there is of Sam, who’s a literal hardcore civil rights activist in the comics. (Or that there’s an undeniable undertone that it’s somehow more noble or awesome that the white guy is doing the bare minimum, but that’s for another post)

Basically what I’m saying is: More Activist/SJW!Sam Wilson would be

nice. (russianspacegeckosexparty 2015)

Another fan takes a broader view of the issue, seeing it as a fandom-

wide phenomenon but once again remarking on the centrality of Rogers as a figure onto which all socially progressive issues are projected almost exclusively: i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: tumblr has a weird obsession with tossing random fictional characters/historical figures into random contemporary political issues by their ankles and deciding that said character/person would totally be an uber progressive and make the right choices and support their argument with painstaking research

and like



i get it? to a certain extent? fiction at least has been used as a tool to

contextualize political issues for a billion years and whatever, it’s fun to sit around and talk about how Steve Rogers is totally a gay socialist and Bruce Wayne is totally a socialist too and Bucky Barnes is a Jew, and also gay

what makes me uncomfortable is that a) tumblr treats these posts as if

they’re valid and in-depth political statements even though they’re inevitably more about how great a character/historical figure is than the issue itself, leading to some weird and honestly cringeworthy leaps like, idk, the word feminazi is bad because Steve Rogers thinks its bad as opposed to it just being an awful word? as well as turning every political debate into a fandom squabble

and b) an overwhelming amount of character/historical figure tumblr

decides to bring up in these scenarios are white dudes! i hate to bring him up for the third time because i luff him but Steve gets put on a pedestal for just about EVERY political issue while Sam Wilson is lucky if he gets like, a scant mention about joining a Black Lives Matter march. (theseerasures 2015)

The contrast in the reception of these two lines of meta commentary

hints at the discrepancies in fandom’s focus on social justice issues. Although

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in the case of Rogers there have been multiple, highly detailed, incredibly popular pieces of fan fiction written to buttress and expand his position as a subversive figure, there has been almost no writing around Sam Wilson that has been either as prolific or as widely acclaimed.2 Indeed, Wilson is most often marginalized in these narratives, if he is present at all. As has been demonstrated by the glowing accounts of the power of fandom’s research capacity and its willingness to dig beneath the surface of presented narratives, this discrepancy cannot be explained by a lack of knowledge about contemporary issues, canonical support, or likeability of individual characters.

If fandom communities are to be seen to be intertextual and reactive,

then which texts and which character revisionings gain traction and have an effect on fan work also must be examined. Without an intersectional lens, it is easy to see the translation of the hinted-at elements in Rogers’s character as a subversive piece of reclamation, but seen in context with the centering of his whiteness, it becomes a much more complex act of both upending and reinscribing power hierarchies.

Algorithm 2: Fan Fiction and Ideas of Subversion

The identification of fan fiction as a resistant form of writing has

remained contested, nowhere more so than when scholars have concentrated on the genre of slash. The genre of slash has attracted the most attention thus far in fan studies. That is not to say more broad-based theoretical models have not been proposed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s (2006) edited volume provides several theories about how fan fiction functions, with a repeated emphasis on its value being due to its affiliation with women’s writing practices and its potential to disrupt canonical hierarchies. Abigail Derecho (2006) proposes a reading of fan fiction as “archontic literature,” allying it with a “technique used for making social and cultural criticisms” used by “minority groups and women” (61). For Derecho, this writing is subversive regardless of its content because its creators are women and its plenitude results in a constant destabilization of meaning. She concludes, “Fan fiction is philosophically opposed to hierarchy, property, and the dominance of one variant of a series over another variant. Fan fiction is an ethical practice” (77). Coppa (2006b) draws from ideas of theatre to theories about fan fiction’s emphasis on bodies and plot repetition to show how reiterations of similar actions can still bring pleasure. She also links the value of such

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writing to the fact that it was primarily written by women. Catherine Driscoll (2006) comments on the intermingling of romance and pornography within fan fiction, something that I will examine in more detail in the next chapter.

This largely celebratory position has been complicated by scholars since

then who have pointed to problematics of ascribing such utopian forms of resistance to fan writers and readers and who caution against the tendency, as Brownen Thomas (2011) terms it, “to highlight and celebrate only those interpretative abilities that are shared by critic and fan alike” (5). Despite this, a hierarchy in the kinds of fan fiction that have been taken up for specific study continues to be visible. Even as scholarly work on fan fiction has diversified in terms of theoretical approaches and texts, most of the discussions regarding the site of subversion have referenced slash.

Initially, this was partially motivated by the seemingly unique disruption

of correlations between the (presumed) sexuality of the women who were interested in the genre and the sexuality of the character/pairings they were invested in. Following from this, further research has been conducted along the lines of both examining the content of such writing and the constitution of the communities producing it. Arguments about the subversiveness of the content, for instance, have proceeded along the lines of its sometimes reinforcing heteronormative structures, both in terms of narrative tropes that encourage traditional iterations of nuclear family domesticity and the erasure of women characters (Hunting 2012; Scodari 2003, 2012).

Some scholars have also questioned how fan fiction that experiments

with different body structures like Mpreg (male pregnancy) both disrupt and reinscribe essentialist notions (Åström 2010). Slash fan fiction has a long history of negotiation with biological imperatives, moving from tropes like “sex pollen,” in which an alien force like sex pollen briefly compromises the characters, to the most recent evolution of these ideas in the form of A/B/O (alpha/beta/omega) universe structures. Within the latter, individuals (mostly concentrating on white cisgender men) are classified along highly essentialist positions that dictate their societal roles, stemming from assumptions about their sexual roles. As with all fannish tropes, fan writers will sometimes disrupt these roles or question their effects on individuals, but they will just as often allow them to play out straight up in what has been analyzed as a negotiation with issues of rape culture, consent, and sexual fantasy (Busse 2013b).

Criticisms around slash have come most stridently from those who see

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the domination of male-embodied narratives, within both fandom spaces and fan studies, as a sign of the continuing patriarchal discourse around which narratives are considered significant and subversive. This has sometimes been backed by the identification of most writers in these spaces as heterosexual women, thus leading to fetishization of gay male sexuality (Scodari 2003). Similarly, pushbacks to this position have pointed to the high number of queer women in these spaces, which to some scholars indicates that the texts are in a much more complex negotiation with queerness, homosociality, identity, and identification than correlative models allow (Busse, Lothian, and Reid 2007; Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 2006; Tosenberger 2008b). Lucy Baker (2016) discusses these issues in her examination of the ways in which fan works often regender characters. Baker maintains that despite slash communities being made up of queer women, the ways in which women characters are written still hold meaning: In fanworks, which can create relationships and characterization out of the least representation, the charge of female erasure has greater sway. There is the contention that the woman writer as a presence in her own work undoes the absence of women in her work (Lackner et al. 2006; Russ 1985). This does not address what Diaz describes as the mirror problem: “If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves” (Stetler 2009). The authorial presence, the audience presence, does not negate the wider lack of reflection and representation within the text, even when the audience can and will identify with the Other whose representation is made clear. Fanwork takes its place alongside and with the wider media and is subject to the same critiques. (27–28)

Baker’s analysis does not take into account the operations of racial iden-

tity in the regendering of characters, which complicates ideas about how lines of identification may function, but her point about the effects of the erasure of (generally white) women characters can be seen to extend to considerations of characters of color as well.

This is also the case for the genre of femslash, which has been practi-

cally disregarded in larger theorizations about fan fiction communities. As I will explore in more depth in my last chapter, whereas the disruption of normative models of identification that was seen to function with presumed

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(white) heterosexual women interested in male embodied queerness caused slash fan fiction to be analyzed with special attention, because the (white) women interested in femslash were automatically assumed to be queer themselves, this was seen to be less significant. This imbalance has continued even given the acknowledgment that slash writers and readers have a significant number of queer-identified (white) women among them. The question about why these queer-identified women would choose male-embodied sexualities to explore in their writing is now theorized along the ideas of the male body offering greater freedom for such women. These arguments contend that writing queer male bodies facilitates the distancing of women writers from the effects of misogyny and rape culture in a way that writing about female characters does not permit. In terms of more explicitly sexual writing, it is argued that erotic fantasy projected onto a body that is wholly other frees imagined experience, allowing for heightened physical responses that are unmoored from actual experience (Rachel A. 2015). As I argue with Swati Moitra in our discussion of femslash, “While all these arguments each have some validity they continue to remain stable only when a singular axis of difference is considered—that of gender. The almost total domination of white male bodies forming the focus of well over sixty years of documented male slash writing (drawing primarily from English-language media texts) points to the fact that some male bodies are clearly too much ‘the other’ to form the object of fantasy or escape” (Pande and Moitra 2017, ¶ 2.4). Clearly, then, models about what constitutes subversive writing and/ or marginalized communities need to be inclusive of other aspects of identity apart from gender and sexuality. This would lead to more nuanced criticisms of fan fiction as practice and community than those that oppose its utopian framings based on the fact that fan writers and readers often pursue familiar narratives and return to well-worn tropes rather than upending these structures (Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss 2007a; B. Thomas 2011).

When fan fiction is critiqued for its reliance on tropes and archetypes,

this analysis misses the fact that these tropes are also invested in whiteness. As Pugh (2005) argues, fan fiction’s affinity for tropes and archetypes is a feature of the genre, as these familiar narratives are then made available to a broader range of characters. In this context, it is crucial to pay attention to which characters are summarily refused a place in these same tropes, narratives, and archetypes. Further, to reference my earlier argument about

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Hannibal fandom, just as racial identity is elided when the taboos around cannibalism are discussed, it also rarely inflects notions about what constitutes heteronormativity, heteropatriarchy, or boring narrative choices. I explore this aspect further in the next chapter in relationship to the construction of the fannish notion of kink, but as Black feminist scholars have articulated, what constitutes ideas of forbidden love or romance itself (and therefore any disruptions thereof ) is often heavily coded. Kathryn Perry (1995) points out that “interracial love has a complex relationship with romance, being in a sense still forbidden love, even if it is no longer prohibited. Unlike romance, this forbidden love promises no guiding fantasy of integrating sexuality into a socially sanctioned relationship” (173). This critique is important because the significance of interracial heterosexual relationships is often dismissed in media fandom communities. The reasons vary, but often canonical heterosexual relationships in particular are seen to be playing into heteronormative scripts. As Perry maps out, this script is rarely available to anyone except white men and women in Western media. The operations along these lines of reasoning can be traced in the case of the fandom that formed around the Star Trek (2009) film, which rebooted the iconic franchise after a gap of some years. There was understandably much excitement in the lead-up to the movie, both in larger fandom spaces as well as within fandom communities whose history is bound up with the initial run of the show in the 1960s—as I have discussed in Chapter 1—and whose slash fan-writing practices around the characters of James T. Kirk and Spock have formed the bedrock of media fandom studies. The film was successful, and the chemistry between Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) rapidly made them into a fandom juggernaut.

However, the reboot also paired the character of Nyota Uhura (Zoe Sal-

dana) with Spock in a romantic relationship, which led to some amount of friction within fan-writing spaces. In the original series, Uhura was played by Nichelle Nicholls, a pathbreaking role for an African American woman on television that continues to resonate today (Carrington 2016). However, for many slash writers, Uhura’s canonical presence as Spock’s romantic interest in the modern iteration was jarring. This was reflected in fan fiction and in meta essays that were scornful of her role and that accused the script of reducing her to the status of merely a love interest. This trend was criticized by many Black women fans, who pointed out that for canon to pair Uhura

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with one of the film’s heroes was in fact an unusual and subversive act, as Black women are seldom depicted as romantic leads (Scodari 2012). For media fandom spaces to attempt to erase this, often in toxic ways drawing from racist stereotypes, and then frame these efforts as a way of furthering queer representation, is obviously a dubious and effectively racist position (peri_peteia 2009).3

This conflict has been parsed as part of fandom ship wars, which rou-

tinely erupt between individual fans who are attached to different pairings for any number of reasons (Chin 2010; Souza et al. 2014). As I will argue in Chapter 5, as opposed to dominant theorizations that split fandom activity into the genres of slash, het, and femslash, fans will often move among these categories and participate in different spaces at different times. It is also true that for some fans, slash, het, or femslash pairings hold a particular attraction, and they seek these dynamics across media. The friction between the Kirk/Spock and Spock/Uhura camps can be explained by a conflict in what fans need from texts, with Kirk and Spock’s potential queer relationship taking precedence over Uhura’s role, however pathbreaking. Although individual fans may be attracted to particular dynamics without necessarily being motivated by racist impulses, when fandom patterns are examined both within and across genres, they are unavoidably repetitive in favor of the elevation of white characters. Building from this context, I will now examine how considerations of racial identity complicate existing theorizations about the relationships between fan work and canon and character archetype and narrative.

Algorithm 3: Racial Identity and Fan Work versus Canon

One of the key influences in media fandom has been the ways in which

media fans are seen to expand on and question the limits of the canon of various popular cultural media texts. This conflicted relationship, where fans are simultaneously drawn to such texts and frustrated by their limitations, has long been identified as the motivator for the production of fan works, particularly fan fiction (Jenkins 1992; Fiske 1992; Booth 2010; Jamison 2013). This is a complex negotiation because there are many factors that might make a popular cultural text inhospitable to certain fans, depending on their entry points into its narrative universe. Again, the expansion that has most

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interested fan scholars has been around the axes of gender and sexuality, where fan fiction is seen to expand the possibilities of such structures that are limited by the demands of the market to follow heterosexist scripts. Coppa’s (2006b) influential formulation is relevant here: “Because fan fiction is an amateur production accountable to no market forces, it allows for radical reimaginings: plots, themes, and endings that would never be permitted on network television” (237). Jamison (2013) also identifies this tension: “Driven by an engagement with commercial culture but free from that culture’s market constraints, fanfiction can experiment with the popular—with no need for backers, no need to sell the product before it’s been realized, and with the luxury of an audience that is already eager to see its works” (23). This oppositional positioning, between the media creators that attempt to exert control over their products and the fans who wish to experiment with such material, remains at the heart of most defenses of media fan communities and has informed much scholarly examination around the issues of copyright and fair use (Tushnet 2007; De Kosnik 2009; Busse and Gray 2011). The mainstreaming of media fan cultures has led to some reconsideration of these power structures, as content creators become steadily more attuned to the ways in which these subcultures function. For instance, scholars have discussed the ways in which social media platforms like Twitter have allowed a much greater level of interaction among writers, actors, and fans (Scott 2009; Chin 2015; Stein 2015). In some cases actors also take an active part in debates about the characters they play, including their potential relationships. As Bertha Chin (2015) points out in her discussion of the fraught relationship between actor Orlando Jones and the Supernatural fandom, these exchanges are not always smooth, indicating uneven power differentials within these new transmedia environments.

Another intertwined aspect of this greater accessibility between fans

and producers is the ways in which popular cultural texts themselves have shifted in terms of plot and narrative. Even though an overwhelming number of popular cultural texts produced in the media industries based in the United States and the United Kingdom remain concentrated on white heterosexual male protagonists, there has been some diversification in the roles that are available to white women and nonwhite actors. Although these are still mostly heteronormative, the scope of allowable relationships between these characters has also expanded. Where once the queer subtext between

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characters (the basis of the popularity of slash and femslash pairings within fan work) was discussed only within subcultural spaces, today these possibilities are often toyed with by producers themselves. This toying is in some cases looked at with suspicion by fan communities, who see it as queerbaiting (Fathallah 2014), in which the potential for such relationships is never actually realized, but nonetheless these story lines are no longer completely made invisible in popular cultural texts.

So far these shifts have influenced fan studies to reexamine the rela-

tionship between producers and audiences in relation to the monetization of fan practices and the exploitation of fan labor by these multinational entertainment conglomerates (Scott 2009; De Kosnik 2012; Flegel and Roth 2014). What has been less examined are the effects of this change on the kinds of fan works being produced and on the critical commentary around such trends. Fans who have been articulating their frustrations with the ways in which race in particular is handled in those space now have an increasingly strong position from which to debate these issues. This is not a new phenomenon, and the visibility of current debates has been heightened by changes in platform for fan activity. However, as seen in the controversy around The Force Awakens, the expansion of roles traditionally given only to white male actors in terms of affinity to fannish archetypes is forcing a greater recognition of the patterns of erasure within fandom. This is new; fan communities have traditionally been ahead of the curve in the ways in which such representation has functioned.

This debate may be repositioned by assessing the ways in which these

changing texts reflect on the oft-cited plenitude of possibility within fan fiction communities. The interaction between fan text and media text has mostly been examined in terms of it being productive of an almost limitless multiplicity. However, an analysis of the effect (or lack thereof ) on fan texts of the expanding canonical roles for nonwhite characters is key to bringing into focus the limits of those imaginative exchanges. This is not an attempt to prop up problematic media texts that are still restrictive in their narratives but rather to point out that it is only when nonwhite characters have been given a level of primacy in canon that debates about their sidelining are allowed to be articulated within fandom spaces with any degree of confidence. This experience has been jarring for many nonwhite fans who have bought into the countercultural ethos of fandom spaces. In a Tumblr

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post entitled “The Moment You Realized Fandom Was Racist,” a fan shares an experience and calls on others to contribute to the conversation: So, what was the show that made you realize how racist fandom was? We all have that one show/movie/book that made us realize that this “geek haven” we thought was for everyone really wasn’t.

Mine was Young Justice.4 Now, I’d read a lot of fanfic before YJ (mostly

white slash, and I never thought too much about it). I was still becoming comfortable with my sexuality, so slash was pretty comforting for me. I read a lot of Merlin/Arthur, but I noticed that there wasn’t that much fic for Gwen or her brother Elyan. I pushed it out of my mind. Then Young Justice happened and with it, Kaldur’ahm. And he was EVERYTHING fic writers loved. He was strong and compassionate, had an interesting backstory, had a difficult love life, etc. . . .

I was expecting TONS of fic for this guy, he was great! But Kaldur didn’t

really get a lot (or any) appreciation compared to the rest of the cast. He was judged harshly. . . . And the more I looked into this instance, and others in other fandoms, the more upsetting it became. Those same patterns were repeated in EVERY fandom regarding black characters.

That was my wake up call. What was yours? (mikeymagee 2016)5

This narrative is common; my respondent interviews reflected this as

well, pointing to the process whereby a space that, through the functioning of its fandom algorithms, continues to project itself as diverse and inclusive—a geek haven—explicitly in opposition to more mainstream spaces, which are overtly inflected by the white machismo of geek culture. Mikeymagee’s remarks also document the unease that many participants feel when attempting to articulate their discomfort with white queer relationships being elevated in fan spaces because of their own queer identities, which marginalize them in other aspects of their lives.

This process points to the fact that rather than these criticisms being

articulated by fans who oppose slash or femslash practices because of their homophobia or their attachment to specific characters or pairings—the most common ways of framing such fan antagonisms—these positions are generally arrived at after an extended period of experiencing repeated patterns of erasure. This is not an easy or unconflicted process; it is usually only

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brought to the forefront once such fans can look to the canonical primacy of a nonwhite character to support their claims that such characters also deserve to be centered in fan work, especially fan fiction. This is in opposition to the ways in which fan fiction is sometimes seen to be unmoored from a restrictive canon—in fact, often in glorious opposition to it. As Baker (2016) points out, some of the strongest arguments about the power of fan works has been their ability to “create relationships and characterization out of the least representation” (27). Conversely, their repeated inability to create representations and characterizations out of even well-fleshed-out characters that play on recognizable fandom archetypes, such as those mentioned by Pugh (2005) as at the core of the production of fan fiction, must be conceived of not as a glitch in the system but as part of its very structure.

Algorithm 4: Fandom and Escapism

Although fan studies has increasingly complicated the simplistic

assumptions about the lack of conflict within fan spaces, these conceptualizations have focused on specific communities and fandoms arising from conditions unique to those situations. For instance, Chin (2010) comments on the difficulty of gauging notions of power in fan fiction writing communities in particular because of the continually shifting hierarchies: while a fan may be celebrated for her contributions to fan fiction fandom, for instance, she may not be as popular within another group of fans who subscribe to a different interpretation of the text, not because she lacks the skills or dedication in producing a quality piece of fiction, but because her interpretation of the text is deemed unacceptable by those vying for power and authority to represent fandom. (77)

In this conceptualization of fandom, the loosely interlinked communi-

ties attached to various combinations of character and pairing allegiances may fall in and out of favor, depending on the priorities of a particular subset of fans. This is also linked to the idea of endless plenitude of fan fiction. Within such plenitude, it is assumed that a particular character or narrative arc being neglected in one context will be redressed in another fandom or another fandom community. This is reflected in communal fandom

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etiquettes that encourage nonconfrontation and tolerance, encapsulated in axioms like “ship and let ship” (SALS) and “your kink is not my kink, and that’s OK” (YKINMK). I will tackle the specific connotations of the latter formulation in Chapter 5, but here I interrogate the assumptions that underpin these general truisms as universally applicable.

On one level, the common sense of these axioms is clear; they seem

to be quite straightforward strategies for individuals to follow. However, on another level, it is also clear that these directives also encourage individuals to look at fan spaces ahistorically and relegate repeated patterns of erasure of nonwhite characters as something that is the effect of external forces—the vagaries of individual fan choices, the popularity of antiheroes, the effect of certain popular pieces of fan fiction, the attachment of fans to archetypes—rather than as the actions and encouragement for such erasure found within fan spaces. As fans of color have repeatedly argued, although all of these individual issues may be true of specific cases, they cannot be seen to disqualify every combination of character type, trope combination, and narrative that works for a majority of fandom (as evidenced by the output in fan work), except when the focus is a nonwhite character.

An example of this kind of analysis is a fan examination of the treat-

ment of the character of Cisco Ramon, played by Latino actor Carlos Valdes, in the fandom of the popular superhero US-based television show The Flash (2014–). The post breaks down the number of works of fan fiction (on AO3) that Ramon features in in any capacity and finds the number to be quite low. This is puzzling, as the poster points out: A fast talking, funny geek with super powers and family issues is fandom crack. He should be the little black dress of this fandom. He HAS been in other forms in other fandoms. How different is Cisco from a Willow Rosenberg, or a Charlie Eppes, or a Newton Geiszler, or a Tony Stark, or a Fox Mulder, or even a Felicity Smoak?

The fandom math just doesn’t add up. What’s going on?



And I think . . . cannot help, but think . . . that despite a racially diverse

cast with a canon interracial couple, there are hundreds more Barry/Leonard stories than Barry/Iris, even though Leonard is now on another show and Iris and Barry are literally married on another Earth. Essays keep crossing my dash and I keep wanting to say “not in my fandom,” but yeah, today I have to stand up and say “yes, my fandom.” Yes, it’s happening here. (dragonmuse 2016)6

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The case of The Flash fandom thus distills the issues that I have been

discussing throughout this chapter, including the erasure that seems to result even when the canon of the popular cultural text itself offers plenty of options for nonwhite characters occupying familiar fandom archetypes. If nonwhite characters are still getting sidelined in terms of fan work produced within such a scenario, then it becomes clear that the seemingly value-neutral axioms or fandom algorithms are far from neutral, and in fact actively prevent any changes from taking place within fandom structures. Conversely, such axioms encourage the belief that the consistent sidelining of characters of color should not be identified as racist because that injects uncomfortable real-world politics into purely subjective choices about fictional narratives. In such a scenario, the often tacit advice for those fans who are uncomfortable with such patterns is to find another fandom space rather than create drama within the existent one.

However, unless those fans are content with their fan works being

less popular as well as classified as duty fic or produced in the context of a special-interest fan work festival, irrespective of which text they choose to devote their fannish energies to, they will be mostly unable to find a fannish space centered on their characters of choice. There are some exceptions, of course—Korra and Asami Sato from the animated television series The Legend of Korra (2012–14) and Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood from the fantasy television series Shadowhunters (2016–) are both the main pairings in their fandoms—but these are few and far between. Indeed, I have often been presented with evidence of nonwhite characters gaining some secondary traction in certain fandoms (though still vastly underrepresented proportionately), to which I respond by pointing out that by ascribing this presence as some kind of proof of fandom’s progressiveness is also to tacitly cede that such secondary status is the best that fans of these characters can, and more crucially should, aspire to.

Much as Bronwen Thomas (2011) observes that scholars of fandom have

often looked for and highlighted “those interpretative abilities that are shared by critic and fan alike” (5), I am aware that my arguments may seem to be falling prey to the reverse of that impulse—as motivated by fandom’s failure to live up to progressive ideals that have been imposed upon it. However, these ideals are also circulated informally within media fandom spaces, and the disappointment in their limitations is felt most keenly by participants who have contributed to their formation and continued robustness. There is also some

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hypocrisy in these positions, as white fans who join protests against whitewashing when effected by media industries such as Hollywood seem to turn around and embrace those same practices within fandom spaces.

This intervention has been a necessary one in the context of media fan-

dom’s increasing positioning in the mainstream as a safe haven for fans of popular cultural texts who are sidelined by more mainstream interests that are attempting to monetize these spaces. It is inevitable that phenomena like #GamerGate (which began in 2014) and the large-scale trolling against women-centric films such as Ghostbusters (2017) and Ocean’s 8 (2018), which has seen women geeks being targeted by mainly white cisgender male fans for daring to encroach into their spaces, will remain the focus of much of the writing around experiences of discrimination in fandom spaces (Salter and Blodgett 2012; Chess and Shaw 2015). Nonetheless, it is equally important to highlight the patterns of erasure and discrimination that continue to structure even liberal spaces within these formations. This is because fans in marginalized positions have often turned to these spaces with an expectation of their identities being recognized, valued, and explored. Their experiences must therefore significantly complicate any generalized ideas of how pleasure and escapism may function within such spaces.

This point is evident in the differing responses of my respondents to the

question about whether they chose to curtail their engagement with issues of racial, cultural, ethnic, and religious identity as a result of fandom being an escapist space. Once again following Wanzo’s (2015) assertion that the same practices show distinctly different features than previously theorized when analyzed in terms of nonwhite fans, I asked the question in order to see what kinds of escapism, if any, were available to them. This was also a question prompted by the repeated justification that fannish spaces avoid questions of racial identity and discrimination because they are too fraught to be engaged with in arenas that are meant to be for fun and enjoyment. While some respondents were able to elide these concerns, for others, the ability to escape into imaginary worlds was predicated on those spaces remaining sensitive to their concerns: Some aspects of fandom—fanfic, podfic and fanart—are purely escapes for me, and I’m careful about what creators and what fandoms I will consume for entertainment, in order to avoid stereotypical or problematic presentations. (Respondent 3, interview with author, 2014)

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I think that fandom is partially an escape for me in that I’m 99% certain that the characters I read about (especially in RPF [real-person fic]) are definitely not as nice as we wish they were. But at the same time my personal engagement in fandom has been to try to involve some aspects of racial or ethnic identity—it doesn’t always work/I don’t always go there, but I do try. (Arzoensis, interview with author, 2014) Fandom is a safe space for me, both to think about things creatively (let’s talk about characters from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun if they were mapped onto Howl’s Moving Castle!) and academically (what constitutes emotional abuse, and are we misinterpreting it as romantic tension + poor communication when in fact it is an unhealthy relationship?). BUT—and this is a big but—that safe space goes away when I get too upset with the source media to enjoy playing in its sandbox, so to speak. (Jedi-seagull, interview with author, 2014) Fandom’s usually an escape for me because there are a good number of women of color in fandom but sometimes the way hockey itself interacts with race (such as blackface or Hawks fans wearing headdresses) does upset me.7 (Respondent 15, interview with author, 2014)

The enjoyment of fannish spaces is clearly far more contingent and

precarious for some fans rather than for others. Additionally, and tellingly, for many respondents the escape relies not on switching off but on finding like-minded fans—not just in terms of fannish texts but also in terms of not being able to discuss problematic aspects of fandom’s safe spaces. One respondent’s answer sums it up best because it spans the spectrum of what escape might mean from the personal (trying to deal with marginalization and exoticization in fan spaces) to the various, sometimes contradictory strategies that are required in order to keep enjoying fandom spaces, even as they inevitably remain under threat: Sometimes, my escapism—my way of pretending that fandom is MUCH better than the rest of the world, as opposed to just *marginally* better *most* of the time—is to give people a chance to fuck up *where I can’t see them*.

Of course, this does not always work.



As we know, fancreatures are humans, and humans are products of prej-

udiced cultures, and fail happens. And happens. And happens some more.

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Sometimes? There are other kinds of escapism. The best kind, I think,

comes from shows like Elementary, which *is* a fucking unicorn, in that it’s a show which rings the cherries in terms of racial/ethnic/cultural/sexual/gender representation—and handling that representation *well*—and which has a fandom that is, while small and quiet, deeply appreciative of the quality it brings to Western media. Wallowing in that canon and fandom is an excellent way to pretend that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

Other kinds of escapism . . . well, for a long while? Part of what kept me

in certain *parts* of the DCU *was* the overwhelming cishet-White-maleness of those parts. When there was diversity? For the most part, fandom was adding it ourselves. Which, on the one hand? That’s fucked-up! But on the other hand, DC is terrible even for a western comics company. The worst of the *worst*. You give them a Black male? He’s a dead man. You give them a White woman? She’s going to get raped and/or depowered and/or murdered. You give them a woman of color? She’s going to get whitewashed and/or depowered and/or murdered and/or removed from continuity. You give them a man of some other non-White race or ethnicity? He’s going to be whitewashed *before* he’s depowered and/or murdered and/or removed from continuity.

They? Suck BALLS.



It’s just safer playing with the white boys and racebending and trans-

bending and queering things up and so on and so forth—at least you have a fair chance of those White boys surviving.

On a similar level, when you’ve got mostly White boys running around?

Less chance of ignorant fancreatures doing ignorant shit ignorantly.

I will *never* forget what it was like to be a part of Smallville fandom, to

be a nerdy *Black* girl in Smallville fandom and have onscreen—at last!—a wee little nerdy Black boy (Pete Ross) with a snarky mouth full of pop culture references and woobie insecurities and all those things that ALWAYS get given to the White boys in teen shows . . .

. . . only to have fancreature after fancreature write him as a “gangsta”

stereotype.

Despite him being raised in Kansas farm country.



By a motherfucking *judge*.



It’s been thirteen years and that vein is *still* throbbing in my forehead.8

(Te, interview with author, 2014)

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Algorithm 5: Identity and Infrastructure

So far I have focused on the more affective functioning of fandom algo-

rithms that facilitate the continued projection of media fandom spaces as generally liberal and progressive in their politics, except for isolated glitches. This is also reflected in the informal arguments circulated within these spaces that it is unfair to target them for such racist trends because their participants are largely powerless to effect change. Further, castigating participants, who are already marginalized in terms of their gender and often their sexuality, for their choices in the realm of popular culture where they retreat to escape is an ineffective way to create a stimulus for change. I have combated these assertions by highlighting the ways in which these choices and freedoms are heavily contingent on axes of identity apart from gender and sexuality. It is also not useful to frame these criticisms as activism for change because that construction places any fan work that does deal with nonwhite characters as automatically motivated by a desire to score social justice points rather than as participating in a communal fandom exchange of pleasure.

In this section I will examine the functioning of fandom algorithms

in the form of digital infrastructure. The seemingly neutral and universal axioms regarding fandom etiquette often reinforce the status quo in such spaces. These axioms also extend to advice around the use of digital fandom infrastructure, which is often lauded for an organizational capacity that participants can utilize for their specific needs. A “correct” use of such infrastructure allows for a successful curation of fandom experience. Busse and Gray (2011) note this use, stressing fan creativity within it: “Fans use wiki software, blogging platforms such as LiveJournal.com, or bookmarking sites like Delicious.com in very specific ways: LiveJournal.com, for example, was never intended to serve as a story archive, yet many fans developed specific workarounds such as newsletters, announcement communities, and particular tagging and bookmarking systems to customize the site for their particular use” (434–35). Alexis Lothian (2013) points out the specific politics of such fan archival activity, highlighting how the establishment of stand-alone fan advocacy organizations like OTW and its affiliated fan work archive, AO3, has affected questions of the conservation of subcultural digital ephemera.

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Further, the rise of Tumblr as a platform for fannish activity has also led to changes in the way fandom digital infrastructure functions, as I discuss in Chapter 3. Although there are certainly other platforms that also host fan works, such as Wattpad, FanFiction.net, and sites for non-English-language fandom-specific fan works, Tumblr and AO3 are the two platforms that have formed the basis of much of contemporary fan studies research.

The processes whereby racial identity is a structuring force while also

being made invisible in the workings of digital environments have been the object of study for several scholars in the fields of internet studies and digital humanities, including discussions of the process of erasing the labor and contributions of nonwhite innovators of such technologies, as well as the ways in which aspects of their interfaces and internal algorithms are structured by a default whiteness (Sinclair 2004; Taborn 2007). Anna Everett (2002) has pointed to the uncomfortable implications of the naming structures in DOS that designated “master” and “slave” disks, while Nakamura (2002) has discussed the ways in which drop-down menus are often used to categorize race as a knowable and discrete category. I discuss the effects of such digital categorization in Chapter 5 in terms of the classification of cyberpornography.

Apart from these examples, the operation of racial identity within the

digital structures of internet-enabled platforms is also sometimes felt as an exception when it is named as such and when it enters into spaces read as neutral but that are actually spaces that center on whiteness. These operations are largely parsed in rhetorical structures that ask, “Why are you bringing race into this?” as if this is an additive and disruptive aspect of experience in what was up until then perceived as universal. For example, the popular home-sharing service, Airbnb, which encourages individuals to rent out their extra rooms or apartments to other people in a sharing economy, has been criticized for the differential experience that Black users have consistently reported. Airbnb’s trust system, which is based on landlords and guests rating each other, is seen to operate in an unbiased way, but racial prejudice is expressed because the landlord’s individual preference about whom to rent to is given the ultimate say in guest approval (Vedantam 2016). In this context, it is also vital to see how these structures affect the use of subcultural digital ephemera in media fandom spaces. I thus now address these operations, specifically with regard to the ways in which fan work is accessed, tagged,

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and archived, as well as how the whiteness that structures these interactions becomes inescapably foregrounded even for users who might wish to curate and filter their experiences according to fandom conventions.

In the cases of both Tumblr and more fan work–focused archival web-

sites like AO3 that focus on fan fiction, users tag content in order that it might find an audience. Although fan work is usually created for free within a gift economy, it is also created within an expectation of appreciative feedback and the accrual of positive social capital (Fiske 1992; Hellekson 2009a; Scott 2009). Tumblr and AO3 both allow the use of free-form tags, which means that any combination of words or letters can be used as a description. Tumblr in particular frequently tweaks the search algorithms that order such tagged content, so it is difficult to make definitive judgments about their functioning. Nonetheless, in most cases, fan creators tag their content according to the source text it is based on, the characters that feature in it, and the pairings, if any, on which it is focused. Further tags are sometimes used as warnings for specific aspects of the fan work, but these are more subjective. I discuss them in Chapter 5.

AO3 has a more structured tagging etiquette, and volunteer fans, called

tag wranglers, classify free-form tags as general tags if they reach a certain level of use. The site also encourages the classification of fan work by the media text or texts on which it is based, as well as the specific characters and pairings. Warnings are optional, although certain ones such as those that signal issues of consent are classified as Archive Warnings. If a user chooses specifically not to warn for such content, this information is also listed. Fan writers often use the Additional Tags section to write free-form descriptions of the content or use the Author Notes sections to list any additional information that they would like readers to know.

In terms of access to filtering options, Tumblr introduced a feature

that allows users to block content that has been tagged quite late, in 2017. Before this, additional add-on programs, such as Tumblr-Savior, were independently created that functioned in the same way. AO3 also recently, in 2018, added specific options to filter out pairings or characters within queried fan works, though this can be achieved through creative use of the general search feature. In this case as well, individual users had earlier come up with add-ons specific to the site that allow for more targeted filtering, but these were not part of the site itself.

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One might therefore speculate that tags would permit users to select

only the content they wish to see, thus actualizing the operation of, say, “ship and let ship.” However, in practice, these tagging structures often foreground the erasure of nonwhite characters within such communal spaces. Within AO3, for instance, there is no way to indicate which pairings are the focus of the fic and which ones are merely referred to in the background. This has led to consistent complaints from fans of femslash pairings, the tags to which are often included as mere tokens in fics that are mostly focused on juggernaut male slash pairings. This may be combated to some extent by these fans choosing specific fandoms where women characters are primary in fan works, but this strategy is generally not available to fans of nonwhite characters even when they play a primary role in source texts (Pande and Moitra 2017).

While this may be parsed as an inevitable reflection of the influences

that I have discussed so far in this chapter, I also wish to draw attention to the ways in which this structural making-visible has specific effects. To take up the example of the character of Sam Wilson from the MCU once again, the search results for his name on both Tumblr and AO3 illustrate these effects. I turn to my own experience here as both a fan and a fan-scholar to reflect on my own position in this debate. On Tumblr, tags are often used to start conversations, find content, and find like-minded fans of specific characters or pairings. As someone who has been a longtime participant in fan spaces and is experienced in the functioning of fandom algorithms, both axiomatic and digital, I expected to be able to easily curate my experience as a fan of Sam Wilson and as someone who has read extensively within slash fandoms. However, as I explored Tumblr’s terrain, I realized that most of the time I had set aside with the expectation of enjoying content about the character was instead an exercise in frustration. Far from a stress-free experience, I spent this time scrolling through fan work, meta essays, and head canons that had Wilson featured almost exclusively in supportive, secondary roles to white characters such as Steve Rogers. His positioning within the canon as a counselor for US war veterans (being one himself ) was also leveraged for the benefit of the white characters around him, reminding me suspiciously of the mammy stereotype that haunts Black characters in particular (Brown Givens and Monahan 2005; Woodard and Mastin 2005).

On AO3, my content searches had much the same results. There was

little point in searching for content by character tag because I was faced with

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thousands of works of fan fiction that a quick scan revealed would not feature Wilson in any meaningful way. I then moved on to the specific pairing tag of Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson, as most of the fan work around Wilson was created within this pairing. As I attempted various combinations, I was shocked by the fact that (as reflected in the structures that the tags made visible to me) there were more fics focusing on the pairing of Steve Rogers and Darcy Lewis (a heterosexual pairing of two characters that have never even met in the MCU canon) than on any pairing involving Wilson. I had no expectation of Wilson becoming a juggernaut character, or of his relationship with Rogers even coming close to the massive popularity of his relationship with either Bucky Barnes (32,498 fics) or Tony Stark (23,297 fics). As AO3 skews toward hosting fan fiction focused on male character relationships, I found it unbelievable—yet uncontestable, given my search results—that the character of Wilson did not generate more material than even that of het pairing around characters who had never met.

This quantified proof of the systematic erasure of Wilson’s character was

all the more jarring in the intertextual communal spaces of fandom, where ideas of social justice are vigorously debated and entertainment companies like Marvel and DC are castigated for their failure to put nonwhite characters in leading roles in their franchises. As for options on how to deal with this erasure as I negotiated fan spaces, I realized that there was no tagging or filtering strategy on Tumblr that I could deploy because the “Sam Wilson” tag itself almost never had any content about him as a primary character. If I wanted to engage with that part of fandom at all, I could not avoid the parade of stereotypes and microaggressions that made up most of the content around him. Following specific creators whom I knew to be safe was an option, but this strategy cut me off from the larger fannish ecosystem surrounding the MCU. AO3, although slightly easier to filter, provided more evidence of just how undervalued the character was in a fandom that kept parroting sentiments like “everyone loves Sam Wilson.” Tumblr’s and AO3’s tagging and search systems resulted in continual glitches in my fandom experience. In short, to reference Nakamura (2012) once again, the problem was not the noise in the signal, which I might somehow tune out. The problem was the signal itself.

I have framed this experience in immediate terms rather than as a dis-

tanced case study to implicate myself in its workings and also to show how these interactions are deeply personal to fans. The workings of the fandom

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algorithms that I have formulated in this chapter particularly work on the personal investments and expectations that media fandom spaces have encouraged. The resulting glitches must thus be seen to have equally personal costs.

Conclusion

My aim in this chapter was to broaden the debates around the truisms

that have so far structured examinations of the functioning of fan communities by bringing them into explicit conversation with notions of racial identity. The term “fandom algorithms” encapsulates the affective and technical structures that are presented as, and seen to be, neutral in their functioning. Although these algorithms are perceived to work toward preserving the utopian ideal of media fandom communities as progressive and liberal, instead they mark these spaces as overtly structured by white heterosexual masculinity. By interrogating the specific effects of considerations of racial identity on intertextual communitarian interpretive spaces, the place of subversion in fan work, the relationship of fan work to canon, the formulation of safe spaces, and the structuring of digital fandom infrastructure, it becomes clear that each of these categories cannot stand as universal or as unstructured by the workings of white privilege as a core element. In my last chapter I examine the fan fiction kink meme as a microcosm that disrupts linear notions of fan activity, contextualizing this discussion with considerations of racial identity.

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But, How Is That Sexy ? THE FAN FIC TION KINK MEME

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5

The scope of fan studies continues to expand rapidly as new relationships are being mapped among media fan communities as well as the producers and marketers of popular cultural texts. Researchers are increasingly considering the repercussions of working more closely with industry partners and the ethical implications of such collaborations even as notions of legitimate fan activity are being interrogated (Scott 2009; Zubernis and Larsen 2012; De Kosnik 2012; Bennett, Chin, and Jones 2016). This has placed an increasing focus on more public fannish behavior, such as fan conventions, cosplay, and fan tourism, as well as on the ramifications of transmedia convergence among fans, actors, and producers (Porter 2004; Brooker 2007; Alden 2007; Booth and Kelly 2013; Duchesne 2010). At the same time, however, this mainstreaming of fan activity has meant that fan works that have traditionally been seen as covert subcultural practices, such as fan fiction, are now in the public eye. This can be seen in attempts by fan writers and corporations to monetize fan fiction, as examples like the publication of James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and the establishment of official fan fiction publication platforms like Kindle Worlds show.

The widespread discovery of what is perceived as outré genres of fan

fiction—mainly slash—has led to mainstream news outlets confronting actors and creators with racy excerpts in order to garner clickbait responses (Romano 2013; Wilken 2015). These instances now generate their own cycles of reaction and critique. Inevitably celebrities or mainstream commentators will belittle or mock such practices, leading to fan scholars producing

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defenses of them by highlighting these texts’ fruitful engagement with gender and sexuality in particular. I hope that it is clear that aspects of these engagements provoke my discomfort. Of course it is important to defend fans against repeated critiques that reduce fan work to such sensationalized exchanges. However, I prefer to focus on how these defenses inevitably minimize troubling intrafandom dynamics, notably around racial identity. The academic framing of fan fiction has almost exclusively proceeded along the axes of sexuality and gender, with race remaining consistently sidelined. This is particularly true for the studies that have gained canonical status in the field, whose white-centric theoretical models continue to dominate contemporary scholarship. These theoretical models have their roots in pornography and romance studies—two fields that have also been critiqued regarding these same issues of erasure or sidelining of racial dynamics.

I find it fruitful to analyze the practice of fan fiction from all three main

vectors—gender, sexuality, and race—at once in order to push against some of its foundational tenets and popularized truisms. I will consider fan fiction’s relationship to the mainstream genres of pornography and romance novels, highlighting how it functions in a liminal space, not just in terms of content but also in terms of people who participate in these spaces. The genre of slash fan fiction has been the focus of most academic theorizations of how fan writing functions, so my own work must engage with these arguments. However, the generic divisions—het, slash, femslash—are not closed-off compartments. Continuing to conceptualize these spaces as completely different in their functioning has led to blinkered conclusions about how the fannish ecosystem works today, as many fans have moved among these positions.

The analysis of fan fiction (particularly slash) as itself a subgenre of por-

nography is not new; many theorists have framed their analyses within this interpretive rubric (Penley 1992; Kustritz 2003; Driscoll 2006). Others have argued that an emphasis on explicitness is misleading, noting that fan texts also draw on romance novels for narrative structures and generic expectations (Bacon-Smith 1992; Woledge 2006). Another thing to be considered is that initially, when slash fan fiction was talked about as pornography, it was seen as more egalitarian, based on notions of intimacy rather than the more extreme examples of market-produced, image-based pornographic material. This has been complicated somewhat since then, with theorists now considering texts with edgy sexual content, but the romance versus

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pornography disciplinary split remains evident (Isaksson 2009; Reid 2009; Flegel and Roth 2010). Yet the fields of pornography studies and romance novel studies have not acknowledged where and how they intersect, leading to a split in how their consumers are conceptualized (particularly in the case of women) in terms of what uses these texts are put to, and by whom. Also relevant here is the place of erotica as a genre that draws from both fields while paradoxically maintaining that it is neither.

The divisions among pornography, erotica, and romance novels (espe-

cially as the latter have become more explicit in their content) do not stand up to scrutiny, and in ignoring these divisions, work on pornography geared to women limits itself. Driscoll (2006) positions fan fiction as an example of text-based pornography-romance that blurs these categories. I follow on from Driscoll’s work, contextualizing these fan writings within already existing trends in genres of women’s reading and writing. I also consider the relationships among different genres of fan fiction itself. Further, I want to disrupt ideas that split fan fiction’s focus between notions of vanilla versus hard-core sexual explicitness. Through a study of kink memes—that is, interactive fan fiction writing communities focusing on sexual kinks usually hosted on sites like LiveJournal and Dreamwidth—I examine how these communities produce notions of kink that encapsulate the categorizations of vanilla and hard core within their continuum.

Pornography and romance novel studies are wide-ranging fields, so my

primary aim in the brief overview that follows is to interrogate the particular assumptions they reinforce about the composition of their audiences. For pornography studies, this circulates around the focus on film, the relation to authenticity, the assumed correlations between viewers’ gender and sexual identities, porn’s engagement with racial identity, the effects of the advent of internet platforms, and the rise of queer pornography.

Foundational Texts and Trends

What is perceived as pornographic depends on notions of audiences,

aesthetics, and economic and material conditions. Although initial analyses revolved around a range of primarily textual material (Marcus 1966; Sontag 1967; Carter 1978), the defining movement of the field, which established the trajectory for pornography studies as a whole, was the porn wars in feminist thought, a debate that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. My focus here is

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not on the feminist critiques of pornographic material in North America led by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in the 1970s and 1980s, which resulted in an uneasy alliance with a conservative legal system. However, these critiques still resound in any conversation about the field (MacKinnon and Dworkin 1997; Vance 1984; Segal and McIntosh 1992; Gibson and Gibson 1993), as they deeply influenced which pornographic material would remain a focus for scholars, partly as a result of legal actions. Although Dworkin and MacKinnon include both pictures and words in their definitions of porn—and Dworkin (1974) wrote a scathing article on Pauline Réage’s classic erotic tale, Story of O (1954)—their work was used in legal prosecution primarily directed at visual pornography (Cossman 1997).

Yet notably absent here is a consideration of the genre of textual por-

nography—to be precise, sexually explicit novels and other erotic prose written by women. This omission is puzzling, especially in light of how far and wide the net of pornography studies has been cast; it has examined a wide variety of topics, including reality television, talk shows, and advertisements (Paasonen, Nikunen, and Saarenmaa 2007). A notable exception to this is Ann Snitow’s (1979) work on the genre of Harlequin romance novels. Snitow does not have a high regard for the genre itself, characterizing it as “unrealistic, distorted and flat” (143), but she does propose a radical idea: positioning traditionally nonexplicit material as “essentially pornographic” (154). Although Snitow’s particular analysis of how Harlequin romances functioned vis-à-vis their readers is dated, I am primarily interested in her acknowledgment that these texts were written unequivocally to “elicit sexual excitation” (156). This idea has been underexplored even as the overtly sexually explicit content contained in these texts has grown. The connected genre of erotica has also been virtually ignored.

In the book widely considered to have launched porn studies as an

academic field—Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989)—Linda Williams admits that her focus on the visual and “hard-core” examples of it are motivated by a combination of “practical, theoretical, and political reasons” (6) rather than any belief that they form consistent characteristics that might delimit the genre. Additionally, while Williams admitted in the 1999 revised edition of Hard Core that her shying away from other genres, particularly LGBT pornography, was unnecessary, her original stated reasons for doing so remain thought provoking. She explains,

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First, as a heterosexual woman I do not feel that I should be the first one to address questions raised by a body of films not aimed primarily at me. . . . It is thus precisely because heterosexual pornography has begun to address me that I may very well be its ideal reader. Conversely, because lesbian and gay pornography do not address me personally, their initial mapping as genres properly belongs to those who can read them better. (1989, 7)

Several key assumptions are at work here that continue to be present in

scholarship on pornography.1 Williams draws clear connections between her identity as a heterosexual cisgender woman and the type of pornographic film that she feels that she is qualified to analyze. Even though she admits that she is not precisely the intended audience for much of the heterosexual material that is her subject, the overlap in the sex acts depicted and her own sexual preferences are enough for her to presume to embark on the exercise. This correlation between the sex acts depicted in a pornographic text and the sexual and gender identity of the imagined audience is a tenuous one, but it has remained influential.

Ideas of Authenticity

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a veritable explosion in the field, with

scholars attempting more situated and nuanced analyses of different genres of (still visual) pornography. These studies split along axes of sexual identity such as that envisaged by Williams (1989)—gay male scholars analyzed gay pornography, lesbian scholars analyzed lesbian pornography, and so on. Gay pornography in particular was interrogated in a variety of ways: its political role in making gay sexuality visible (Bronski 1984; Waugh 1985; Dyer 1994; Fejes 2002), the types of bodies presented as desirable (Harris 1997; Duggan and McCreary 2004; Padva 2002), and contested notions of masculinity and desire that intersect with race (R. Fung 1991; Hamamoto 2000). Significantly, although the importance of such pornography to the formation of cisgender gay male identity and subjectivity has been theorized in academic circles, there is little anxiety registered around notions of authenticity vis-à-vis the performers in the videos; in fact, straight hunks are often a selling point of certain videos. Furthermore, scholars remain unconcerned with questioning the gender and sexual identity of viewers of such material.2

In contrast, the anxieties around lesbian visual pornography are

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manifold. The phenomenon of pornographic material featuring ersatz lesbian sex or girl-on-girl action, produced explicitly for heterosexual male audiences, has complicated notions of the representation of true lesbian desire. Commodification and fetishization of lesbian sexuality in a larger heterosexist male-oriented culture continue to haunt writing on lesbian visual pornography, with the figure of the butch lesbian emerging as an early marker of authentic lesbian sex. For instance, in her review of trends in lesbian pornographic film, Heather Butler (2004) maintains that the figure of the butch authenticates lesbian pornography: “She turns the screen into a potentially safe space for the visual representation of lesbian desire” (169). The idea that most commercially available lesbian pornography does not feature real lesbians is a well-established critique, and there have been repeated attempts to produce a distinct aesthetic of filmed pornography in opposition to such mainstream productions (Smyth 1990; Bensinger 1992; Ryberg 2015).3

This need for markers of authenticity must be located within the spe-

cific political movements of the 1980s and 1990s (both within and outside feminist discourse) as well in terms of a larger resistance to the co-optation of lesbian sexuality to evoke male heterosexual pleasure. However, this anxiety also points to slippages whenever strict correlations between sexual and gender identity and the consumption of sexually explicit media are put into place. In line with Jane Juffer (1998), who warns against the tendency of criticism about sexually explicit material to fall into either wildly celebratory or condemnatory positions—either hunting for good transgressions or bad hegemonic structures—I do not intend to position these slippages as always productive of positive outcomes. Rather, I aim to interrogate the dialogic and dialectical relationships they expose among categories presumed to be entirely separate.

Pornography and Racial Identity

The split between “good” and “bad” pornographic texts is even more

charged when it comes to the theorization around the role of racial identity within pornographic visual texts. This has been a fraught engagement; it interrupts the habitual mapping along heterosexual and homosexual axes of interpretation and identification. To recall once again the “science” of racism, which I discuss in Chapter 3 with regard to creation of the category of

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race itself, it is vital to trace its effects in the ways that racialized bodies are also sexualized. Indeed, as numerous theorists have argued, racialization is always already sexualized (S. Somerville 2000; Barnard 2004; P. Johnson 2001). This racialization has proceeded on differential lines across bodies, and it affects individuals in various ways. As Jennifer C. Nash (2014) reflects on Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) pathbreaking work on the representation of Black female sexuality, this is a complex process, often drawing together altogether oppositional imagery. Nash notes, Images of deviant black maternity (the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare queen) and of an excessive black female libido (the jezebel, the hoochie, the video ho) present black female sexuality as uncontrollable, even as they point to different sites of sexual excess. For example, if the mammy is masculine, effectively feminizing (and possibly queering) her male children, the jezebel is excessively desirous and hyper-reproductive. Even though these images are, in some ways, at odds, the underlying ideological consistency is that both contain an excessive performance of gender and sexuality, which endangers the viability of the state, the heteronormative family, and conventional gender roles. (2014, 82) This hypersexualization is not limited to heterosexual pornography, as Kobena Mercer (1994) points out in an analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe’s fetishized homoerotic images of Black male bodies. Similar processes can also be seen in the images of the hypersexual yet submissive Asian woman versus the desexualized Asian man, the exotic Indian body with its secretive sexual knowledge enshrined in the Kamasutra, and so forth (Hansen, Needham, and Nichols 1989; Uchida 1998; Capinho 2006). The effects of these stereotypical images can of course be seen everywhere in the mainstream mediascape, but perhaps nowhere are these stereotypes made as visible, and in a sense naturalized, as within filmic pornography. I use the word “naturalized” because these depictions are placed within a space that foregrounds the inherently problematic nature of human sexuality itself, thus making it difficult to make specific critiques.

A central question for scholars who wish to critically engage with the

racialized tropes that structure such texts is whether this structuring forecloses the possibility of pleasure for their nonwhite, male, and heterosexual viewers. If the answer is yes, then this position becomes uncomfortably allied

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with the conservative antipornography arguments that disproportionately targeted marginalized communities through their censorship (Cossman 1997). Relatedly, the question of viewers who are not white has rarely been a focus for pornography studies, especially where it concerns women. As Nash (2014) notes of her experiences studying the depiction of Black women in pornography, My interest in how black women are depicted in pornography is often heard—or misheard—as an interest in how black women are violated by pornography. These experiences of being misheard prompted me to wonder if a black feminist project on pornography could articulate a theoretical and political stance that avoided a condemnation of the racism imagined to underpin racialized pornography. What would it mean to read racialized pornography not for evidence of the wounds it inflicts on black women’s flesh, but for moments of racialized excitement, for instances of surprising pleasures in racialization, and for hyperbolic performances of race that poke fun at the very project of race? (14–15)

These are charged questions, and not something that I have space to

answer here. However, they do point to research directions that push toward possible pornographic representative practices that allow nonwhite bodies the same breadth of sexual possibility granted to white bodies. Texts can work toward destabilizing and interrogating historically charged tropes in line with Nash’s conceptualization of “surprising pleasures.” This concern is increasingly forming a focus for researchers who study amateur do-it-yourself (DIY) pornographic cultures that have been facilitated by internet-enabled platforms.

Online Platforms

The growing importance of internet technologies in the production

and dissemination of, as well as access to, sexually explicit material—or Porn 2.0, as it is sometimes called—remains focused on visual media (Attwood 2010). Researchers have concentrated on newer production avenues being used by women producers in particular, including women-run websites, the work of cam girls, and the production of queer porn (Magnet 2007; Russo 2007; deGenevieve 2007). The move online has also meant an explosion of

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amateur-produced films, with DIY and indie aesthetics becoming more and more popular (Attwood 2007). This diversity extends from the types of bodies being filmed to the sexual acts, sexualities, and gender identities being represented and framed as sexually arousing. However, as Jennifer Moorman (2010) points out, the simple availability of diverse visual pornographies does not mean a lack of regulation by a hierarchy of allowable desires. She argues, “Online architecture, visual language and address often endorse a dominant view of sex and gender identity, particular positions from which to see and understand the online environment” (155). As Moorman found in her review of popular pornography sites, “Some kinds of ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ pornography, typically focused on the display of women’s bodies, are grouped with straight pornography, while gay male pornography and bisexual pornography that includes guy-on-guy action are generally not included at all, or they are segregated to other categories” (155–56). I agree with critics who see mainstream visual pornography websites as ordered by hierarchical, normalizing binaries that for the most part engage with alternative sexualities and with racial and gender identities largely in a fetishistic manner—as evidenced by labels such as “gay” and “lesbian,” but there is also more nuance to this narrative (Patterson 2004). One complicating factor is that these websites are used by a diverse range of people, both as producers and as viewers. Members’ ratings of and comments on videos influence the videos’ overall rank, thus opening up the possibility of nonnormative performances gaining visibility. Additionally, the slipperiness of markers signifying authenticity versus fake performances is evident: “While some recent girl-on-girl pornography includes markers of lesbian authenticity such as strap-ons, dirty talk and rough sex, it does not appeal to a sense of community or shared experience through visual and verbal cues such as the figure of the butch, the word ‘dyke,’ or practices such as fisting” (Moorman 2010, 159). However, my own review of such material indicates that practices such as fisting now do appear in videos categorized under the Lesbian tag. We clearly cannot take such community-based cues as absolute or unchanging; nor can we dismiss them as co-optation. Further, we must also interrogate the universalization of such community cues. Considerations of access (as aggregator websites host a large amount of free material) must also play a part in analyzing how such material interfaces with users, regardless of the intended audience.

This also the case with queer visual porn. Facilitated by the internet,

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such porn provides a space wherein both performers and producers aim to destabilize normative categories. I am wary of privileging one genre of explicit material over another, with subversiveness as the only marker of value, but this genre does show some of the possibilities of usually fetishized bodies regaining some agency. Indeed, self-identified queer porn sites explicitly position themselves against the websites that aggregate content. These sites are avowedly political, declaring that they aim to deconstruct the categories that order most aggregator sites (“Indie Porn Revolution,” http:// indiepornrevolution.com/indie-porn/).

Queer porn, like lesbian or dyke porn, depends on the production and

maintenance of authenticity to ground its subversive ethos. The difference between it and mainstream visual pornography is not so much in the acts depicted but rather the assurance that the performers in the videos are genuinely enjoying themselves and the videos themselves are produced ethically. The sense of community that is projected is as important as the perception of fluidity among rigorously defined categories. Moorman’s (2010) interview with Courtney Trouble, webmistress of NoFauxxx.com, touches on this last aspect. For Trouble, “Everything is so fluid, and it all gets lost in the creation to consumption translation anyway—why label it? I also work under the understanding that people do not watch pornography that matches their sexual orientation. (For example, dykes don’t only watch ‘dyke pornography,’ heterosexuals don’t only watch heterosexual pornography)” (165). Moorman does not pursue this thread of discussion but does point to the lack of categorization that is a feature of videos on queer porn websites and the implications of that refusal to label in the manner of larger aggregator sites. An aggregator website called Queerporntube.com functions in much the same manner as more mainstream sites, providing links to free pornography clips from a number of sources and encouraging people to upload their own. Although this site uses categories to organize material, it does not use slurs in its terminology, and the site is respectful of its visitors and the sex acts depicted, thus hinting that organization does not always produce a hierarchy of desire. It must be noted, however, that if taken without the context that the queer porn community insists it provides, some of these terms by themselves can be problematic and fetishizing.

For instance, NoFauxxx.com’s refusal to racially mark its models was

seen by Moorman (2010) as a pushback against the excessive exoticization of certain communities by mainstream visual pornography. The category

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of “people of color” might be seen to be working against that, except that within the particular context of the queer pornography community, potential viewers have some assurance that it is a category used productively to represent those individuals in nonfetishistic ways. This is admittedly not a foolproof set of standards. Indeed, it results in a certain amount of judgment of the nonwhite performers who choose to participate in more mainstream sites. People habitually use labels to order their experiences, sometimes productively, and although the context of queer pornography certainly allows for a subversive reappraisal of dominant categories, the constant dialectic between mainstream and underground movements, as well as the possibility of people being present in both simultaneously, must not be overlooked. It is this, as well as Trouble’s radical insight into the lack of correlation between what visual pornographies depict and the gender and sexual identities of their audiences that I wish to take forward as I turn to the field of romance novel scholarship.

Theorizations around the Romance Novel

A notable deviation from the focus on filmic pornography is Jane

Juffer’s At Home with Pornography (1998), in which she considers a variety of materials, including self-identified feminist pornography, couples pornography, lingerie advertisements, romance novels, and erotica. Juffer’s primary gesture is a move away from the “tired binary” (2) of the pro- and antipornography debates that had so dominated the field. She locates the distinctions among pornography, erotica, and romance novels as not grounded in any concrete set of identifiable characteristics but rather driven by notions of aesthetics and, importantly, questions about access. Juffer points out that publishers are aware of the association of the pornographic with dangers of censorship. The positioning of explicit material is therefore dictated by economic strategies that maximize visibility while still remaining within normative standards of decency, especially when displayed in public spaces like bookshops. Juffer illustrates this point through Susie Bright’s multivolume edited series, Herotica (first volume published 1988). Bright edited the first three volumes before moving on to Best American Erotica (1993).

Juffer’s (1998) assessment of Herotica (1988) as self-consciously dis-

tancing itself from the falsity of mainstream visual pornography’s ideas about women’s sexuality shows how claims of representing authenticity

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are complex within the textual sphere as well. These claims emerged from contemporary debates about women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure as well as the privileging of certain sets of aesthetic principles, such as “the valorization of the clitoral orgasm, the emphasis on the naturalness of female sexuality, and the reconciliation of fantasy and reality, all of which worked to differentiate erotica from pornography” (Juffer 1998, 73). The first volume of the Herotica series declares, “The most obvious feature of women’s erotic writing is the nature of the woman’s arousal. Her path to orgasm, her anticipation, are front and center in each story” (quoted in Juffer 1998, 125). Significantly, the second volume includes depictions of a wide range of sexual fantasies, encompassing heterosexual, gay, and lesbian scenarios. The series is still aimed explicitly at women, but there is a move away from correlating that to any one stable sexual identity.

Apart from Juffer (1998), there is little critical consideration of these

and other volumes of erotica that were published at around the same time, perhaps because their overt positioning as literary texts succeeded, thus removing them from the purview of both pornography and romance novel studies. This omission is significant in light of the fact that these volumes were specifically linked not just to broad feminist political concerns but also to the actual practice of women exploring sexual pleasure in an embodied fashion—that is, they are explicitly tied to masturbation discourses.

The practice of publishing collections of, as Juffer terms it, “identity

erotica” (1998, 128) gradually moved toward more general framings of sexual fantasy, and Bright herself moved on to edit Best American Erotica in 1998. However, the influence of these more explicit collections were felt in the larger industry, with mass-market paperback romance novel publishers like Harlequin and Mills & Boon commissioning series that were advertised as far steamier than those previously published. I would like to link back to Snitow’s (1979) contention that the popular romance novel was always functioning as a pornographic text. The introduction of explicitness is not really a change in their function, so to speak. Rather, it is a response to the evolving ways in which women approached their bodies and sexual pleasure. If pornography studies has shown a consistent privileging of film over print, romance novel studies have largely ignored the use of these texts by women for sexual pleasure, adding to the “romance is for the mind, pornography is for the body” split.

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The Embodied Pleasures of Reading

Written material as pornography is often positioned as “pornography of

the past” (Kipnis 1996, viii), before the accessibility of visual media improved. Even in spaces where one might expect a deeper examination of this generic assumption—that is, work devoted to women’s consumption of pornography, as this has historically been seen to be—it remains underexamined. For instance, for Tristan Taormino (2012), the importance of women’s erotic writing, particularly in light of E. L. James’s controversial success with Fifty Shades of Grey (2012), is noted as significant. However, Taormino’s edited volume goes on to focus exclusively on filmed pornography. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the circulation of romance novels/erotica shows that there has only been an increase in this sector over the years, even before the spectacular success of Fifty Shades of Grey. With the advent of e-readers, it has become even easier for sexually explicit novels to be downloaded and accessed.

The pornographic function of romance novels needs to be underlined

in order to break generic divisions that do not hold up to scrutiny. This is not to adopt the oversimplified position that women read and men watch; such generalizations have long been proven false. Yet surely there is room within this paradigm to acknowledge that women also read in order to experience sexual arousal. In my own experience, conversations around romance novels with my peers while growing up and through college life certainly took into account aspects of the narrative involved, but the primary rating, as it were, was assigned according to the hotness of the sex scenes.

While research on the romance novel has certainly diversified since the

early attacks on them as perpetuating sexist ideologies on unaware readers (Millett 1968; Firestone 1970; Greer 1970), the notions of the pleasure to be found in reading them have largely followed (white) heterosexist conventions and singular reader-identity models (Sonnet 1999). For romance novels, readers’ pleasure has been most commonly conceptualized as escapist fantasy from their dreary day-to-day lives (Radway 1984) or as dealing with the issues that (straight and mostly white) women face in order to offer reconciliation strategies that are based on the temporary and symbolic (Modleski 1982). The foundational work both Janice Radway and Tania Modleski has been such that these positions have persisted in most research on the subject. Research on the romance novel has moved toward more situated

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analyses in recent years, working against the idea that there is no differentiation among the various texts available (Ramsdell 2012; Fletcher 2016).

What remains scarce is any examination of the embodied pleasures

that readers may gain from the romance novel. Most analyses of the sexual aspect of the narratives inevitably shift into considerations of how the erotic scenes play out in traditional, scripted ways that reinforce dominant patriarchal notions about women’s sexuality, with female sexual responses coded as passive and reactive to aggressive male desire (Patthey-Chavez, Clare, and Youmans 1996; Sonnet 1999).

In such analyses, the sexual pleasure of female characters in romance

novels is almost never evaluated in terms of the readers’ affective, bodily response; further, any pleasure they afford is implicated in larger considerations of capitalist commodifications of female sexuality. As scholarship has asserted, romance novels do indeed play on and reify traditional gender roles, and they have a sometimes troubled relationship with the depiction of the modern woman. Further, women readers of such texts must negotiate these issues, both in their everyday lives and within the stories themselves. Yet readers also bring complex reading identity positions to texts and use them in different ways, including sexual arousal. Analyses to date fail to account for models of sexual arousal and pleasure that might incorporate narrative and explicitness, without either taking precedence. In my examination of the phenomenon of the fan fiction kink meme, this idea is explicitly foregrounded, with fan notions of kink incorporating both explicit sex and narrative tropes.

Diversity in Reading Positions

Research on young readers has indicated that girls tend to adopt multi-

ple reading positions in texts that are not always correlated to their gender and sexual identity (Fetterley 1978; Bradford 2008; Honeyman 2013; W. Jones 2014). However, this possibility has remained largely unexplored when investigating how women may read romance novels. Laura Kinsale (1992), though still working from a heterosexual model, complicates Modleski’s (1982) and Radway’s (1984) ideas. She posits that women read a romance narrative from multiple positions, citing her own experience of writing the texts as well her readers’ insistence on the inclusion of the male point of view. This argument is stymied by the insistence on a heterosexist frame of analysis, but it does

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open up models of interpretation. Andrea Wood (2008) goes further in her interrogation of the possibilities of queering the romance novel, noting, “By and large, scholars persist in studying and defining romance according to heteronormative paradigms that ignore or relegate LGBTQ texts and their readers to the margins as exceptions to the rule. In part, this tendency has been fueled by feminist focus on mass-marketed texts like Harlequins and problematic assumptions about the gender and sexuality of readers” (12). Wood’s larger project, like mine, examines LGBTQ texts of various kinds published online that, connected to participatory reading practices, challenge the heterosexist definitions of the romance genre. She also questions the “studious” (24) differentiation between the categories of romance and pornography that most analysts on the genre reify. However, what I find most attention-grabbing here is her treatment of the always already existing readers of normative romance novels. She cites Stephanie Burley (2009) to support her argument that the homosocial world of romance reading already queers simplistic formulations of reading practices. Burley maintains, “When we find the heroines irresistible, love our favorite authors, and experience close personal relationships to our fellow readers of erotic literature, we are in fact engaged in a homoerotic practice” (quoted in Wood 2008, 24). Wood argues, building on this, that “ignoring obvious possibilities for queer identifications with or desire for the heroine on the part of female readers is a rather telling and problematic omission” (24). I would go further here: point of view may be connected with reader identification, and reader constructions of gender and sexual identity are fraught with the possibilities of rupture. Wood goes on to examine certain published romance and graphic novels featuring gay and lesbian protagonists, respectively, whose very existence disrupts normative ideas about how a romance novel works.

Slash fan fiction theorists like Penley (1992) have also noted the possi-

bilities of rupture, particularly in line with Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis (1986). Penley locates the importance of their essay particularly in film studies, where it has allowed the idea that “unconscious identification with the characters or the scenario is not necessarily dependent on gender” (quoted in De Lauretis 1994, 140). Penley’s theorization of slash fan fiction itself is not unproblematic, and I will interrogate it further in my examination of the kink meme, but her intervention here is crucial. Indeed, Modleski, in a new introduction to the 2008 second edition of Loving with a Vengeance, grudgingly notes, “Were I to write Loving with a Vengeance today, in light of the essay

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by Laplanche and Pontalis as well as of work by gay and lesbian scholars, I would have to acknowledge the possibility of cross-gender and crosssexuality identifications” (14).

Penley’s (1992) work, and that of other analysts of fan writing, especially

slash fan fiction, remains the most likely to talk about the masturbatory potential of written sexually explicit material (Upham 2017). The possibilities of internet publishing have led to a boom in sexually explicit textual materials of all kinds, including the gay- and lesbian-centered narratives that Wood (2008) examines and increases in the circulation of more conventional novels driven by the advent of e-readers. Susanna Paasonen’s (2010) examination of Literotica.com draws on theorizations of fan writing by Penley (1992) and Driscoll (2006). Paasonen traces the lack of engagement with how erotica affects readers to a general “scholarly unwillingness to address bodily reactions to texts.” She points out, “If acknowledged at all, their sexual dynamics have, for the most part, been analyzed on the general level of ‘experience’ detached from actual reading bodies, even though these sensations are obvious motivation for reading such texts. However, the sensations and experiences conveyed in Literotica feedback and reviews are decidedly personal and intimate” (147). Indeed, the nature of feedback on internet forums—textual descriptions of emotional and bodily responses— does make this “unwillingness” rather stark. Reading communities, like those found on sites like Goodreads.com, now offer the possibility of examining reader responses to sexually explicit material without placing them in environments like focus groups or interviews, where they may feel pressured to give studied answers about their responses to such writing. The romance novel section, or virtual shelf, as it is termed on Goodreads.com, is illustrative of the well-documented variety of the genre, with Fifty Shades of Grey being listed alongside Romeo and Juliet and Sense and Sensibility, along with contemporary romances that feature heterosexual, gay, and lesbian protagonists. Readers rate books on a five-point scale, with an additional option to leave more detailed reviews. They use a wide range of media to communicate their feelings about a novel: they may choose actors to cast a virtual film, thus embodying characters; they may provide pictures of how they conceive of the characters; they may use animated GIFs to communicate feelings of arousal or disgust.

Scans of these comments reveal that many readers wish to communi-

cate their physical responses to the romance texts, and they often disrupt

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supposedly fixed identificatory positions based on gender, sexuality, or both. Women readers clearly use these texts for physically expressed arousal, responding most volubly to those that use both sexually explicit and nonexplicit material to heighten the experience. To insist that one is somehow more important than the other, or to ignore the blatant sexual aspects of a text, is to collapse into reductive models of how the category of the pornographic may be conceptualized.

It is also vital to talk about the ways in which readers’ racial identities

have largely been subsumed within this theoretical discourse. As Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey (1995) note, “As in other areas of feminist work, white agendas have dominated discussions of love and romance. Despite the centrality of colonial and postcolonial ‘others’ (countries, cultures, religions, races, ethnicities and skin colors) to romantic discourses, there has been a stunning silence about such issues within standard feminist debates about romance” (22). In Pearce and Stacey’s edited volume, this is interrogated in contributions by Kathryn Perry, Inge Blackman, Helen (charles), and Felly Nkweto Simmonds, who make critical interventions around axes of sexuality, race, and class. However, the larger normalization of the romance novel as essentially centered on white women characters as a genre has persisted within broad-based interrogations of how the genre works for a universalized audience. As Belinda Edmondson (2007) points out when analyzing specific imprints such as Arabesque (launched in 1994 and eventually acquired by Harlequin), within a larger history of romance writing aimed at Black readers in the United States and the Caribbean, the aims and histories of these texts are intrinsically connected to the personal and the political. Edmondson’s observation of the intermingling of the romantic/erotic divide in this context also echoes my larger concerns: “My conflation of the romantic with the erotic bears some explanation here, since central to my argument is the point that for the black communities of the United States and the Caribbean, it is precisely the eroticism of the conventional romance that must be recovered and highlighted, because it is the black erotic that has long been taboo in the conventional black romantic script” (194). This analysis points to the differential ways in which the emotional/physical divide is problematized across reading positions. However, such specificity is held to be an exception to the (white, heterosexual) norm; lacking are considerations of how such readers may also participate in reading outside these particular imprints.

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This is not to say that issues of race within the romance novel have not

been addressed. Recent scholarship has provided a welcome diversification, but these efforts have centered mainly around the depictions of othered, dangerous masculinity accruing around figures like the orientalized sheikh, especially with regard to the United States’ continuing fraught relationship with the Middle East and its associations with terrorism (Teo 1999; Taylor 2007; Jarmakani 2015). In terms of diverse audiences, there has also been some attention given to postcolonial audiences in India with regard to reading English-language romance novels published by companies such as Mills & Boon and Harlequin. These relationships have mainly been analyzed around readers negotiating ideas of love and intimacy through texts disconnected from their own social realities (Puri 1997; Parameswaran 2002). This has had the effect of bracketing them off as discrete audiences, away from mainstream reading publics through geographical and cultural distance.

This bracketing off also extends to the actual marketing and shelving

of multicultural romance, as the genre is known, in the current moment. If bookstore “porn shelves are organized by race” (Shimizu 2007, 140), then so are romance novels (Faircloth 2015). This is being remedied thanks to the effects of internet-enabled publishing platforms and e-reader-based audiences, the interventions of which have in some cases allowed independent authors to break out of such prescribed niches. These changes have affected reading habits and the possibility of queer story lines; they have also allowed individual authors to include more racially diverse characters in traditionally white-centric genres like the historical romance, which risk-averse publishers have shied away from in the past.

Tracing these specific trajectories in both pornography and romance

novel studies reveals how slippages between the discrete categories of the romantic and the erotic have been shored up and how such formulations have not allowed for a flexibility and fluidity in reading or viewing positions across gender, sexuality, and racial identity. I turn now to an analysis of the fan fiction kink meme to highlight how the interactions of fan communities are particularly useful in illuminating splits in theorizing the romantic and the erotic when considering diversity in community demographics with regard to gender and sexuality. I also interrogate the limitations of these formulations specifically with regard to racial identity.

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Kink Memes and Constructions of Desire

The larger field of fan fiction studies is broad; fan fiction is one of the

most studied genres of fan work, with foundational scholarship establishing it as a site that marks media fandom participation. It has been approached from an equally broad variety of theoretical standpoints, the most influential of which have coalesced around it as a kind of literary writing produced by a community of women that functions as a critique and expansion around the axes of gender and sexuality in popular cultural texts (Russ 1985; Lamb and Veith 1986; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1992; Pugh 2005; Derecho 2006; Coppa 2006b; Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 2006; Busse and Lothian 2009). The communitarian underpinning of these texts has also been theorized to be a key aspect of their production, circulation, and reception. The focus on fan fiction as a democratized form of writing—by women and for women—has remained central to how scholars approach these spaces. These analyses have thus repeatedly underlined the value of such writing even as the genre routinely comes under attack from mainstream commentators, who often see it as a form of plagiarism or underdeveloped writing by adolescents or as evidence of disturbing erotic adventuring (Jamison 2013; Coppa 2014).

This must be seen within the larger context of the interest feminist and

gender studies have shown in highlighting the historical prejudices women’s writing and leisure activities have long faced in the patriarchal mainstream, from their interest in novels in the 1800s to their love of pop music in the contemporary moment (Henderson 1989; S. Shaw 1994; Driscoll 1999; Fairclough 2015). As I have detailed in Chapter 4, perhaps more than anything else, scholars have been interested in the subversive potential of fan fiction as writing against hegemonic popular cultural narratives surrounding conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. As Jamison (2013) argues, “Fanwriting communities enjoy and consume commercial culture voraciously, celebrate it, even as they challenge and transform its products for their sometimes radical purposes. . . . Persuaded by the presence of favorite characters, even the least adventurous readers sometimes embrace stories featuring alternative sexualities and genders or enjoy more stylistically and thematically challenging material than they would otherwise have turned to” (22). This interest has also motivated a scholarly concentration on the

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category of slash fan fiction. As I note in Chapter 4, early theorization focused on why (then presumed) heterosexual women would read and write such material. The perceived shockingness of the disjuncture between who these women were and what sexual or romantic pairings they were interested in therefore follows in the same assumed correlations that I have also traced in pornography and romance novel studies. I have already queried the limits of subversion as articulated in theorizations around slash fan fiction, but here I would like to talk about this aspect in a slightly different fashion.

Penley’s (1992) theorization of slash fan fiction involved the notion of

multiple points of identification within a given text. With regard to stories about the characters of Kirk and Spock in Star Trek fandom, she uses a psychoanalytical model to posit, “In the fantasy one can be Kirk or Spock (a possible phallic identification) and also still have (as sexual objects) either or both of them, since, as heterosexuals, they are not unavailable to women” (7). Today, as knowledge of the participants of media fandom has diversified, it is generally accepted that there is a broad spectrum of identification in terms of both gender identification (though still female allied) and sexuality in these spaces (Melannen 2010; Centrumlumina 2013). This has had the effect of further identifying slash fan fiction as a queer practice, in this case turning around the nature of relationships within these communities, and writing through a different embodiment (Lackner, Lucas, and Reid 2006; Busse and Lothian 2009; Rachel A. 2015).

This paradigm shift affects conceptualizations of slash fandom partici-

pants; it also affects conceptualizations of readers who move between the (largely artificial) generic boundaries of gen, het, slash, and femslash, as well as relationship combinations that cause these categories to overlap, such as genderswap, threesomes, and polyamory. As I note in my cowritten study of femslash fandoms, Since femslash fandoms have been assumed to be dominated by queer women from their inception, there has been very little impetus to examine the motives for their engagement in such activities. In actual fannish practice, particularly with the convergence of fannish activity on shared platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, there has been a noticeable engagement of fans with differing entry points into the common fannish universe. This has led to a significant disruption of long accepted narratives about what has constituted “visible” or “significant” fan activity. (Pande and Moitra 2017, ¶ 2.3)

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This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from paying attention

to differences in how fan fiction works with male-embodied and female-embodied characters and tropes, but there is real danger in observing such trends in isolation rather than on a continuum that takes into account the larger fannish universe.

Slash has been theorized as feminist pornography (Russ 1985); as

women projecting their desire for equality onto male homosexual relationships (Lamb and Veith 1986); and as foregrounding intimacy (Woledge 2006). Camille Bacon-Smith’s (1992) ethnographic approach highlights the importance of community bonds in slash fandom, while Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons’s (2001) controversial (and reductive) reading is based on an evolutionary biology model. Scholars have since moved beyond this pigeonholing of the genre and have explored its links to other modes of writing such as parody (Booth 2014) and commercially published romantic fiction (Morrissey 2014). Yet none of these analyses has taken into account the effect of racial differences.

The fluidity of participants as they move from one genre of fan fiction

to another informs my approach to these spaces. Individual fans certainly might have certain preferences, entry points, and experiences depending on their fannish engagements, but these are rarely watertight compartments. As Chapter 1 illustrates, histories of fan activity are heavily biased toward recording and valuing the activities of white women fans based in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is also true of research on slash fandoms—at the expense of other, interconnected areas of fan interest. A recent instance of this process was seen when the online magazine Vulture showcased fan fiction in a lengthy essay entitled “It’s a Fanmade World: Your Guide to the Fanfiction Explosion” (2015). Part of the feature was a section entitled “A Fanfiction Syllabus: Ten Classics that Cover the History, Breadth, and Depth of the Form, with Original Custom-Designed Covers” (Reisman 2015). The “classic” fan fiction that was highlighted had been curated through consultation with longtime fans and did indeed list some excellent examples. However, the list was dominated by texts that focused on cisgender white men, with no femslash texts included at all. This erasure was criticized by both femslashers and nonwhite fans of other genres, who pointed out how these selections of what is considered noteworthy in fan texts perpetuate and reinscribe erasures and biases within fan communities (allofthefeelings 2015). In a collection of published fan fiction aimed at being

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taught in university courses, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Coppa 2017), there is one femslash story versus five male slash stories, all featuring primarily white characters.

With these contexts in mind, I now turn to an analysis of the fan fiction

kink meme because it in a sense foregrounds the slipperiness and tension between these generic divisions and the fan writers and readers who move among them. Kink memes function on a prompt-and-response model where commentators create a prompt, usually comprising a pairing and a kink, though some prompts can get quite long and detailed. Other participants can then choose to respond to the prompt with a story. Requests are often seconded by other commenters to express approval and are seen as signs of encouragement to potential contributors. Kink memes are generally hosted on the blogging platforms Dreamwidth or LiveJournal, which have comment structures that allow for specific requests to be put up and responded to in a linked manner. The first kink meme, which dates to May 7 or 8, 2007, was reportedly started on a personal LiveJournal and was based around the anime Bleach (“Kink Meme,” Fanlore.org). It is possible that it was not initially intended to go beyond that particular user and her circle of friends, but the idea caught on, and other fandoms soon started to host their own as well. Although fans would sometimes host them on their personal journals, common practice gradually became to create separate, dedicated journals.

Crucially for my argument, kink memes are generally open to all pairing

permutations and combinations. Of course there are certainly more and less popular pairings in each fandom, with a trend toward slash generating the most volume of writing, but there is usually no restriction imposed on the kinds of character pairings allowed. Because of its popularity, much of the fan fiction I discuss here will be slash, but I do not want to imply that is unique in what it offers fan writers and readers. What the genre does help to underline is that correlations between sexual acts and gender identity depicted in sexually explicit material and those of its viewers or readers are largely unstable. Further, theoretical models that base such identification positions on simplistic heterocentric and cissexist gender identity formulations are flawed. The kink meme, although incorporating aspects of more conventional fan fiction communities and modes of production, offers a unique opportunity to show the operations of the slippages I have talked about so far. Additionally, by tracing how fan communities negotiate the category of kink, I argue that such operations display how binary conceptualizations that divide the

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romantic and sexually explicit material are reductive when conceptualizing the category of the pornographic, especially as linked to sexual arousal. I will also consider how kink memes have affected larger fandom practices around ideas of anonymity, communication, conflict, and ownership of deviant desires.

My broader argument, however, is not focused primarily on only the

taboo as linked to fannish ideas of kink; that would lead me right back to notions of classification based on greater or lesser subversiveness, which would be counterproductive. Rather, the larger category of fannish kink has come to encapsulate a variety of tropes, including HEA (happily ever after) narratives, BDSM, bestiality, and Harlequin-style arranged-marriage shenanigans. To accomplish this, I will focus on the kink memes around the US-based television shows Supernatural (2005–) and Glee (2009–15) as well as the movie Star Trek (2009). Before doing so, however, I must contextualize this discussion by considering how other fan fiction communities have engaged more formally with the category of kink, focusing on the Kink Bingo challenge community in particular.

Fan Engagements with Kink

When engaging with the possibility of cross-sexuality and gender iden-

tity models in reading the romance novel, Modleski (1982) resists the notion that these positions are open ended, stressing that readers would have to go through significant questioning of their own inner psychological processes before “unearthing” their “true” responses to texts. She points to an example where Biddy Martin, a lesbian critic, examines her reactions to a particular sports figure, working through multiple layers of self-analysis before attaining a new level of self-knowledge (17). In Modleski’s opinion, this level of self-examination is only available to the highly self-aware—that is, those who have been equipped with the necessary critical tools to analyze such deeply subconscious processes. This is a common script in examinations of popular cultural participants, where the trained critic, who is unmoved by the source text and therefore objective, reads and analyzes the reactions of unaware readers to come to a true conclusion about their motivations. Critics may turn this gaze upon themselves, but that kind of self-examination is not available to all. This idea is contentious and elitist, but certainly when it comes to any discussion of fan fiction communities, the level of

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self-examination is high and constant. These examinations rarely come to any broadly accepted conclusions and inevitably have their own individual blind spots, particularly regarding the role of racial identity and its relationship to shaping fandom trends. However, the polyphonic nature of these spaces does allow for these formulations to be critiqued in turn.

One such example is the Kink Bingo challenge, which has been hosted

on LiveJournal, then Dreamwidth, from 2008 to 2013. This was initially a challenge focused on fan fiction writing (with fan work like art and videos allowed later) organized around the idea of bingo cards (Figure 3). The challenge ran every year for about three months, from June to September, with various nonmonetary incentives being offered for fulfilling challenges. Participants were encouraged to fill in as many bingo squares as they can, and

Figure 3. Example of kink bingo card.

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after the main challenge is over, they were encouraged to post their stories to the community even if they had not completed their card. Kink Bingo has always been a highly self-conscious forum, with fan creators engaged in breaking down what various kinks mean to them. Cards initially listed activities that would fit into more conventional ideas of kink, as Figure 3 shows, but the community has engaged in significant amounts of dialogue around making the challenge as accessible to as many people as possible. In the 2011 challenge, for example, new cards that featured asexual-friendly categories of kink were introduced and new achievement and incentive categories were announced, with special prizes being earmarked for participants who featured “underrepresented communities.” The Kink Bingo moderators introduced the latter by saying, We’ve inaugurated the “Underrepresented Identities in Kink” category because—well—many of these identity categories are underrepresented in kink; identity is an extremely important factor in understanding what a kink means to a particular person. So more diversity in representation of identity, in addition to being a good thing in itself, will necessarily mean more diversity in the representation of kinks and their meanings.

The goal of these achievements is to a) encourage more kinky fanworks

about often-ignored characters and identities, and b) encourage more representation of these minority identities at kink_bingo. For more info on identity and kink, check out the Identity and Kink section of the kink_wiki general resources page.

It’s up to you to responsibly decide whether a given character belongs

to one of these identity categories. Quite often, it is possible for the fanartist to reimagine characters as, for example, disabled, trans, genderqueer, or asexual, even if they don’t belong to those identity categories in canon. We also happily accept Racebending Revenge-style fanworks to fill prompts for a chromatic characters bingo. (kink_bingo_mods 2011)

The post goes on to discuss modes of writing around other underrep-

resented categories such as “fat pornography,” explaining why they choose to use that term as well as providing resources so that participants may gain information about how to write respectfully about those communities. Certainly, then, the participants and moderators of Kink Bingo were engaged in

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a highly self-aware and self-reflexive practice, deconstructing their own attitudes toward the category of kink within the boundaries of the challenge. Their tracking of underrepresented identities shows an awareness of their marginalization within fandom spaces and attempts to create an atmosphere that would encourage participants to engage with them while also providing resources. This is not to frame this community as a perfect or activist space but rather to show how fannish negotiations around contested issues can change productively. As I argue in Chapter 4, these negotiations seem to glitch more often than they work, but Kink Bingo provides a good template for creating inclusive spaces.

I must note, however, that the kinks tackled in the challenge continue

to fit into conventional framings of the term, even when adapted to alternative models. Also, the community is not an anonymous space, as participants have to be able to be identified to be awarded incentives and to claim their completed bingo challenges. I turn next to an examination of the disruption of both those criteria within the framework of the kink meme, particularly the effect of anonymity. These differential modes of fan engagement with the categories of kink occur simultaneously.

Anonymity and Kink Memes

Examinations of kink memes are rare, and when they have been under-

taken, they remain fandom specific, without taking into account the ways in which they have affected fandom dynamics as a whole (Wall 2010; Ellison 2013). One of the key factors in these exchanges has been the effect of anonymity. Although it was not a feature of the initial kink memes, anonymity (at least as an option if not a requirement) has now become common. This has led to a much greater amount of experimentation—in terms of specific prompts, if not which characters remain the focus of fan works—around what is requested and written. One fan, drawing from her own experience, notes that this has led to a lessening of inhibition around taboo sex acts requested and also to a difference in the nature of feedback: Having written slash pre-kinkmeme and post-kinkmeme, I can tell you one thing that’s changed: writers used to be mainly inhibited by fear that their story might be too outrageous. Now that everyone is able to post

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outrageously kinky things as Anons, people have instead become more inhibited by the unprecedented number of complaints that are levelled by other fans with the privilege of going Anon.

. . . Back in those days [before 2002], it was a much bigger deal to criti-

cize things you didn’t like in fic, because you didn’t want to be That Fan, who pissed in everyone’s cornflakes. Very few fandoms had fics in the triple digits, so most slash readers would hope that a lousy writer got better over time, rather than criticize her and risk scaring her away entirely. Now that readers can go Anon, complaints are more common (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say ubiquitous). (berlynn_wohl 2011)

This summary encapsulates several issues central to any understanding

of contemporary fan writing communities. First, although the commentator sees these trends as unique to slash writing practices, it is also reflected in het and femslash writing. As Hannah Ellison’s (2013) examination of the Glee kink meme shows, both the femslash pairings of Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron), and Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) and Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) prompted a high volume of requests that placed them in explicitly experimental sexual situations. These included not only common kinks such as BDSM, somnophilia, gang bangs, scat, and body modification, but also variations around genitalia such as the phenomenon of girl!penis (G!P). I mention G!P in particular because so far, the academic discussion around the genderplay that fan writers explore has concentrated mainly on male-embodied characters, with this seen as unique to slash writing (Busse and Lothian 2009). Yet the implications of genderfuck or genderbending (to use the fannish terms) extend beyond just male slash–centric spaces. When observed in isolation, theorization on such gender play misses how it links to other tropes that are evolving in the same sites, such as the kink meme.

Second, the operation of anonymity has allowed a greater range of

expression and commentary than was previously possible within fandom’s intensely social structure, with an increased level of criticism evident across these spaces. As Karen Hellekson (2009a) has noted, the gift economy that is characteristic of fandom production, whereby fans create content for free, has historically depended on a feedback loop of encouragement from other fans. Though generally framed in celebratory ways, this economy has its own biases, as I note in my discussion of fandom histories in Chapters 1 and 2, my

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analysis of the effects of changes in fandom platforms in Chapter 3, and my discussion of fan antagonisms in Chapter 4. The kink meme reflects these trends: both fan writers and readers (this line is blurred in these spaces) have become more vocal in expressing their opinions about these texts. Kink memes have dealt with this by disallowing kink bashing or negative reactions to prompts and by encouraging a “your kink is not my kink, and that’s OK” attitude. The latter formulation has been an approach that has long been a cornerstone of the functioning of fan writing communities in particular. It encourages individual fans to seek out what they enjoy without declaring that other tropes or pairings are inherently bad or wrong.

The axiom “your kink is not my kink, and that’s OK” follows on from

more general assumptions about the operations of free speech and the wariness about moral policing around fan attachments to certain characters and pairings. Nevertheless, these tenets have not gone uncontested. For example, although most common-use fan writing spaces such as archive sites and kink memes now ask that certain issues (usually rape and sexual assault, but these have expanded) to be flagged or warned for appropriately, this (tenuous) consensus was not reached easily or without considerable acrimony.4 As I discuss in Chapter 4, the relationships that fandom algorithms have with the specific debates around racial identity in fandom have been similarly acrimonious. However, this increased vocality has had an effect on fan writers even outside the issues of racial representation in fan works. Zubernis and Larsen (2012) remark on this in their study of Supernatural fandom, in which anonymity was seen to operate in various ways, including aggression and bullying, but also at times facilitating a questioning of established hierarchies.

Another aspect of anonymity was, and remains, the threat of legal

action to fan communities that explore sexually explicit material or alternative sexualities. Fan fiction itself has always had an uneasy relationship to source texts, particularly with creators who are opposed to transformative work. Fan writers have also been the target of legal action from studios and publishers (Katyal 2006; Tushnet 2007; Schwabach 2009). Some fan writers have also been the target of legal action in their professional lives because their fan work was classified as obscene.5 Despite this, as more edgy modes of kink continue to expand, fan communities must continue to negotiate to accommodate them.

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Differential Modes of Fannish Kink

My focus in this section is on the kink meme of the long-running

US-based television show Supernatural, a fandom that has generated an intense amount of fan activity.6 Its plot focuses on the fate of two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester (Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki), and their fight against various supernatural forces. The source text has generated a plethora of fan fiction around a number of pairings, but the relationship between the brothers was a major focal point of fic written during the show’s first few seasons. Simultaneously, fan writers wrote (and continue to write) RPF around the personas of Ackles and Padalecki, a fandom known as J2.7

Although writing stories around incestuous relationships is not new

in fan fiction—the Harry Potter fandom, for instance, had previously seen a lot of incest fic written about the Weasley twins, called twincest—it was the first time that it became the main focus of a prolific fandom. This has been analyzed in various ways, with Catherine Tosenberger (2008b) arguing that such stories were a way for fans to subvert the relentlessly miserable source text, maintaining that the fics “make things happy—a consistent theme of Supernatural slash is that a romance between Sam and Dean will give them a measure of comfort and happiness that they are denied in the series” (¶ 1.5). Conversely, Flegel and Roth (2010) propose that dark!fic (fan fiction that shows Sam and Dean in emotionally and physically traumatizing circumstances) that writes them as lovers provides a truly alternative sexuality to the often heteronormative scripts played out in J2 fics.

These fandom-specific critiques are valuable for the nuance they pro-

vide, but examining incest fic in isolation misses out on situating it as a trope, or in my formulation a kink, present in many different fandoms. What is unique in Supernatural fandom’s case is the level of attention it receives, which forces a broader consideration of incest as a kink. This results in communities in this fandom developing strategies that facilitate the engagement of fan writers and readers with incest fic in a way that also minimizes judgment. This negotiation occurs in many different spaces, but the discussions remain the most formalized and documented in kink memes, as their anonymous spaces permit negotiations around a taboo subject in ways not possible on other platforms.

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I turn now to examples of how negotiations around both anonymity

and kink evolved. The first entry on the Supernatural kink meme, dated July 13, 2009, is a simple prompt post. It evidently generated a large amount of activity: four hundred requests and sixty fills were written within the first four days. A second post was put up to commend the participants for their enthusiasm and to clarify some issues. The moderator was careful to establish that the community was not in competition with other existing communities, such as Supernatural Hardcore: I’ve seen some folks outside of the community saying that they are intimidated to request fics here that aren’t hardcore kink. I really want to reiterate that while the name of the community is “kink” that is a very subjective term. If something gets YOU off, it’s your kink, and it is very welcome here no matter how “vanilla” or tame you may think it is.

This community is for EVERYONE, truly. So please, let your friends know

that while there may be some things here that aren’t necessarily their cup of tea, if they would like to request a fic—no matter the subject or pairing or genre—they are very, very welcome here. Me and the other two mods are committed to ensuring that above all else this community remains completely free of judgment, and that goes for the most hardcore to the most vanilla request posted. (spnkink_mod 2009)

As this post makes clear, this kink meme site did not spring up to cater

only to hard-core fan writers, as Supernatural Hardcore was already established. Rather, it sought to address the need to allow fans the option of anonymity (not everyone took this option, of course). Issues around maintaining that anonymity were therefore kept in mind, even when floating the idea of cross-posting. Further, the commentary on the category of kink itself, as well as the signaled openness to all characters and pairings, follows my previous arguments about the functioning of such spaces. What is perceived as vanilla versus what is hard core depends on the individual fan: “If something get YOU off, it’s your kink, and it is very welcome here no matter how ‘vanilla’ or tame you may think it is.”

The definitions of vanilla and hard core are context specific. Contrast

the prior notion of hard core to the definition that the Supernatural Hardcore community mobilized:

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In general, our idea of hardcore is one of “Okay, that was fucked up but intriguing—andmaybealittlehot.”

Please note that even though in many corners of the world “incest” may

fall into the taboo category, most of the authors in this fandom consider that more or less canon. There are quite a few wonderful SPN communities that can deliver that for you hourly and while incest is more than welcome here, if incest is your only taboo there are better communities to suit your needs. (spn_hardcore 2008)

The notions of kink and taboo are thus constantly shifting and highly

relative. Even within the communities that attempt to differentiate themselves as hard core, a scan of the tags used reveals categories like “kink: first time” and “kink: cop!Jared,” which complicate any ideas that specific acts may be deemed inherently more or less kinky as they are generally categorized outside fan spaces.

Figures 4 and 5 provide examples of these trends. Figure 4 shows an

RPF prompt with a request to also feature the personas of Ackles and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The framing of the request enacts the process whereby the prompter comes to recognize that subdrop (the mental state that can affect a submissive partner in a dominant/submissive relationship after an intense interaction or scene) could be a kink, as well as the fact that it was a kink

Request: Jeff/Jensen; sub-drop (Anonymous) 2009-07-17 06:07 pm (UTC)

this may be weird to list as a kink but I just recently realized that it *was* one for me :) Jeff/Jensen D/s where it’s their first scene together and afterwards Jensen experiences sub-drop and Jeff takes care of him and helps him through it. If you write this, I will have your babies. (Reply) (Thread) (Expand)

Re: Request: Jeff/Jensen; sub-drop (Anonymous) 2009-07-19 04:47 pm (UTC) Seconded liek whoa.

Figure 4. Example of prompt and response from kink meme detailing prompter’s selfdiscovery of a particular kink.

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REQUEST: Sam/Dean, broken!Dean (Anonymous) 2009-07-17 05:21 pm (UTC)

So, I have this huuuuge vulnerability kink. I love the idea of Dean, who strives to be so in control of himself, just being psychologically very broken (you know, in a much more visibile way than he already is) to the point of almost not being able to function, and in obvious need of being cared for. You can go the emo!porn route with this, or just straight-up, sexless h/c - h/c is totally a kink all on it’s own for me. Thanks! (Reply) (Thread) (Expand)

Re: REQUEST: Sam/Dean; broken!Dean (Anonymous) 2009-07-17 10:18 pm (UTC)

This sounds really good. I second this! (Reply) (Thread) (Expand)

Figure 5. Example of prompt and response from kink meme detailing both sexual and nonsexual possibilities of a kink.

for the prompter specifically. In Figure 5, the prompter sketches out the different kinds of porn that could be written in response to the request. In this prompt, the idea of kink is deconstructed, placing vulnerability at the heart of the desire for a depiction of “broken!Dean” while leaving it open-ended as to whether the fill should include a sexual aspect. This prompt was placed alongside an explicit rape fantasy, which only adds to the feeling that the categories of romance and porn have been utterly dissolved.

In her analysis of the Star Trek (2009) kink meme, Mary Amanda Wall

(2010) examines the category of fannish kink, linking it to Audre Lorde’s (1993) ideas of the erotic as opposed to the pornographic: Just as kink is a trope or genre that gives a reader a particular and personal satisfaction, the erotic for Lorde “is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire” (340). Just as fans can declare their satisfaction with the phrase “this is my kink,” Lorde might use the considered phrase, “It feels right to me” (341), [to] acknowledge the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge. (12)

This is a utopian formulation of the ways in which fan writers and

readers interact with the category of kink. Certainly Lorde was aware of the

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intersectional forces of race and gender that combine at the site of desire. Nevertheless, I agree with Wall’s contention that the category of fannish kink leverages the idea of the erotic with greater flexibility than has so far been theorized.

This flexibility is also evident in the lexical strategies that identify and

activate fandom tropes. Fans use a shorthand illegible to those unfamiliar with these spaces. In Figure 5, for instance, the prompt line contains the key kink to be considered as “broken!Dean,” with the expectation that the individuals scrolling down the page will have an immediate understanding of what the construction broadly means, even as the explanatory notes provide a more specific description. This conjugation can also instantly create new tropes, kinks, or combinations thereof by choosing a specific aspect of a character to magnify. As Wall (2010) points out, this can be a way for a fan to identify the “parts of the whole that bring her pleasure, whether those parts are pairings, body parts, story tropes, or something else, and requests those parts as the kink she wants in her fanfiction” (9). For Wall, fannish kink creates “a moment of heightened attention (heightened!attention) that makes patterns out of isolated moments and fetishes out of a particular arrangement of the canon. This focus of the attention undoes the restraints of the ‘otherwise coherent wholes’ or source narratives and recombines the fetishized parts” (11–12). Here canon is a nebulous concept; prompts will often ask for completely unrelated alternate universe setups, which permit comparisons to more conventional frameworks of pornographic and romantic films and novels. Relatedly, a prompt such as “Cop!Jared finds hooker!Jensen completely irresistible and buys his time for the night. HEA please!” does not actually draw on canon because this is an RPF scenario. It combines the instant gratification and suspension of disbelief for the purposes of sex with theorizations of visual pornography, with the assurance that the narrative will conclude in a way that fits into a happy-ending romance novel formula. This framing emphasizes how commingled romance and porn have always been.

Driscoll’s (2006) discussion of fan fiction as located at the intersection

of pornography and romance is useful here, although she does see them as two traditionally separate and separable genres. Her theorization contrasts with the current use of fannish terms, which reveals the changes that new platforms have effected. One of Driscoll’s key considerations is the difference

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between attitudes of canon, which refers to events that the text under consideration factually contains, and fanon, which indicates popularized fan interpretations of the same. Concerning these categories, she argues that canon is what is required to engage with a fan fiction community because it provides “a means of sharing the story—but fan fiction realism is not an agreed degree of accuracy in representation, but rather a registering of affective power. This is one of the most important ways in which fan fiction locates an intersection of pornography and romance” (89). Conversely, fanon is marked by almost guilty pleasure: “Most fanfic readers will admit to one or more favorite fanon tropes, like Gentleman!Spike or Prostitute!Harry, but hesitantly, because fanon connotes undiscerning identification with an unreal object” (90).

It is thus startling, in light of the examples I provide from kink memes,

to examine how the signification of the embedded exclamation point (!) has shifted. This shift has occurred in part because of the ways in which the forum of the kink meme allows fan writers and readers to anonymously (re) mix their canon and fanon desires, without either being able to take precedence or be marked by the hesitant pleasures that Driscoll sees as significant. Zubernis and Larsen’s (2012) identification of the therapeutic value of such writing is also important here, although they also identify the operations of shame, both as a product of the threat of exposure and as an internalized emotional variable in such operations. Relatedly, and more crucially for my argument here, kink memes allow the interrogation of the category of kink itself, thus foregrounding the central subjectivity of any absolute differential markers of the romantic and the pornographic.

In the context of the nature of embodied reading that I discuss in rela-

tion to romance novels, the response patterns to prompts in kink memes show similar expressions of arousal and excitement. Although readers of romance novels have always been suspected of being too easily swayed by such material, this has always been rooted in a particularly heterosexist and gender-essentialist model of reading positions. When put into the context of kink memes, with fandom’s (documented) queer readers as the participants in these exchanges, this articulation becomes even more significant. This contention is supported by the forms of communication used in these spaces. Because kink memes are structured on a prompt-and-response pattern, and because writers often post responses slowly, over a period of time,

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participants often respond enthusiastically to encourage the writers to continue. An additional effect of anonymity in such spaces is that writers feel less pressured to finish something, which is why encouragement is seen as vital to the functioning of the community. These responses include singular exclamations of pleasure, long examinations of possible character motivations, and expressions like “I’ll be in my bunk” or “BRB need a cold shower,” which are understood to indicate sexual pleasure. There is some debate about whether these are real expressions of actual bodily pleasure or whether they are more about following a fannish convention in responses.

Wall (2010), for instance, speculates that kink memes lend themselves

to a “performance of the erotics of fanfiction” (5) that sometimes has the result of fans distancing themselves from what she contends to be the most powerful aspect of such interaction. Conversely, she finds the most powerful points of exchange to be those “moments when fans do not distance themselves from this erotics of genre—one of unearthing and understanding diverse and diffuse pleasures—[which] hold the potential to become what Audre Lorde [1993] calls ‘creative energy empowered,’ a shared pleasure that can ‘lessen the threat of difference’” (vii). This “shared pleasure” for Wall (and drawing on Coppa’s 2006b theorizations as well) is rooted in the possibility that individual fan writers and readers are themselves participating in sexualized exchange when they engage via a kink meme, performing both themselves and the characters they are writing. Any attempt by these individuals to distance themselves from this notion is for Wall a lessening of its subversive potential.

However, this position, of ascribing less and more subversiveness, can be

seen as assigning value judgments to fan practices, especially because Wall (2010) does not account for the effect that anonymity has on these interactions. It is debatable whether fan writers or readers identify with the characters for which they write prompts and responses to the extent that Wall speculates, as she admits. Furthermore, locating true subversive potential only in cases of identification with characters is counterproductive when looking at the workings of such a wide-ranging structure. A consensus emerges around the contention that fan fiction readers express physical arousal to these texts, but that consensus does not locate the source of arousal to specific markers of explicitness. This can be seen in responses to polling:

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In two informal polls on LiveJournal of 386 and 574 fans, respectively, about 80% of both groups said that sexually explicit fanfiction made them physically aroused at least sometimes, but the majority of these respondents specified that physical arousal occurred only sometimes and that it may not be tied to explicit descriptions of sex so much as stories that “hit their kinks” by using tropes such as hurt/comfort or particular power dynamics in a relationship. (Wall 2010, 16)

Crucial here is the spectrum of gender identities and sexual orienta-

tions expressed within media fandom spaces, as evidenced by anecdotal evidence, fannish interaction, and surveys such as the one hosted by Tumblr user Centrumlumina. Centrumlumina’s survey, which focused on AO3, was conducted 2013 and received around 10,000 responses. Although it suffers from a certain level of selection bias, it did indicate that a significant number—54 percent—of participants in media fan writing spaces identified as belonging to a gender, sexual, or romantic minority. This finding is also reflected in my own respondent data. With such a range of participants, it is also important to evaluate what sexual pleasure might mean as expressed by individuals and whether it is indeed useful to ask whether they really all felt physical arousal. Indeed, when conceptualizing “netpornography,” particularly on blogging platforms, Nishant Shah (2007) observes, “Self-representation (visual as well as verbal) becomes pornographic because of the address the representation carries and the responses it elicits from the consumers of the representation. The ‘pay off’ moment in netpornography is not in the physical orgasm of the consumer/producer, but in the desired or projected orgasm of the user behind the virtual handle. This disembodiment of pornography and its severe wrenching from the notions of body is definitely a unique characteristic of cyberspatial pornography” (35–36). Shah is not talking specifically about fandom practices here; rather, he is referring to interactions on LiveJournal, so the comparison of the textual strategies being used here is productive. Whether using linguistic conventions, the notion of performance, or indeed expressing physical arousal, the readers of sexually explicit materials quoted here are certainly expressing their pleasure in an embodied way, using a vocabulary that has been historically unavailable to noncisgender men (Gordon 1993; Fahs and Swank 2013).

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Limitations of Fannish Kink

Until now I have largely dwelled on the potentialities of fannish kink

as opposed to its limitations, but when brought into conversation with the operations of racial identity, these formulations are stressed. How does race affect the operations of anonymity, reader positions, and free-flowing exchange of erotic potential? As I have argued throughout, these interactions are not outliers of a somehow neutral norm; rather, they show how the structures that facilitate expressions of fannish pleasure also actively work toward marginalizing nonwhite characters. The pleasures of nonwhite fans in these interactions are often contingent and precarious.

Media fandom is a difficult space to navigate critically because it has

many queer- and woman-identified participants who are regularly castigated in the mainstream for the ways they express their sexuality. However, this does not mean that these same participants do not hold privilege relating to racial, cultural, and ethnic identity within these spaces. By concentrating on only certain aspects of media fan identity, scholars often erase the complexity of these interactions in order to arrive at more comforting, broad-based theorizations about intrafandom power dynamics. This results in skewed and incomplete analyses about how these spaces function. It also results in further alienation for nonwhite fandom participants.

Relevant here is Richard Fung’s (1991) examination of the ways in which

gay pornography’s treatment of racial difference affects the material ways in which nonwhite men navigate these spaces. By turns desexualized, fetishized, and dehumanized, the figure of the Asian boy in gay pornography, while generative of pleasure for certain viewers, makes what should be a site of community and acceptance into one of pain. Fung points out, The “ghetto,” the mainstream gay movement, can be a place of freedom and sexual identity. But it is also a site of racial, cultural, and sexual alienation sometimes more pronounced than that in straight society. For me sex is a source of pleasure, but also a site of humiliation and pain. Released from the social constraints against expressing overt racism in public, the intimacy of sex can provide my (non-Asian) partner an opening for letting me know my place—sometimes literally, as when after we come, he turns over and asks where I come from. Most gay Asian men I know have similar experiences. (159)

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This complex intersection demands a reconsideration of the operations

of power, privilege, belonging, and desire within queer spaces. This demand becomes even more urgent when spaces—like fan fiction kink memes, but also fan fiction spaces more generally—are positioned as welcoming difference.

A historic difficulty of discussing the problematic aspects of por-

nographic/romantic/erotic materials is the tendency to impose value judgments on its consumption. This is something that I have flagged in my discussion of race in pornography as well as the categorization of online pornography. However, being wary of value judgments does not preclude examinations of the hierarchies that persist within these texts. The fan fiction kink meme may be conceptualized as a space that specifically foregrounds certain qualities that allow for a more fluid idea of how pornographic, romantic, or erotic texts are used, and by whom. Fannish kink encapsulates a broad spectrum of tropes, acts, bodies, emotional states, and genders; it also permits an expansive theorization of how participants in these spaces identify in terms of gender and sexuality. Yet it is vital to see how this fluidity has failed to elicit a similar reconsideration of which characters are allowed (or excluded from) this expansiveness of experience in spaces where communitarian sharing of pleasure is crucial to their successful operation. Anonymity may allow for a greater amount of experimentation and personal levels of discovery about which sexual acts and emotional states may function as kinks for participants, but it also allows the expression of desires that operationalize racialized, dehumanizing tropes.

To return to Ellison’s (2013) examination of the Glee kink meme, her anal-

ysis finds that Santana Lopez (played by Naya Rivera), whose canon portrayal leans heavily on the stereotype of the promiscuous Latina, is most often placed in sexual situations that highlight this promiscuity. Such a stereotypical pattern is also seen within nonsexual prompts, with nonwhite characters cast in the role of caretakers of white characters, as I note in my discussion of Sam Wilson (an African American character) in the MCU in Chapter 4. Racial prejudice in fandom spaces not only influences the depiction of characters in sexual situations but also forecloses them from participating in broad-ranging notions of kink, which can be generative of thoughtful and nuanced representations of queerness that are not generally available to queer characters in more mainstream texts. It also has the effect of cutting nonwhite fans off from the therapeutic benefits of these spaces.

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It is tempting to place the responsibility for the perpetuation of these

stereotypes on larger societal prejudices and institutional discrimination; fan spaces are not immune from these forces, of course. However, although such institutional forces have power, I am disinclined to follow this line of reasoning because it discounts the fact that fan spaces can and do interrogate the operations of other modes of institutional discrimination, most notably gender and sexuality. It also places the driving force behind these operations firmly outside the mechanisms of media fandom structures. As I note in Chapter 4, most of the truisms concerning fan fiction as a democratized form of writing and fandom communities as subversive spaces must deliberately and repeatedly set aside racial identity in these interactions in order to remain stable. This has the effect of framing the whiteness central to fandom’s structures as neutral or natural and positioning the introduction of racial identity as something that disturbs that space.

Fung’s (1991) feeling of alienation from a community that is meant to

be his safe space parallels that of nonwhite participants in fan spaces. These participants are systemically denied access to modes of fan pleasure even though they have have participated in the formation of these spaces and are well versed in how they function. However, the act of criticizing the limitations of these spaces in terms of race is often seen as damaging to fandom norms and is blamed for making authors feel less inclined to write stories around nonwhite characters. In essence, nonwhite fans are blamed for creating a hostile space. This is a disingenuous argument because it locates this trend only in relation to the ways in which depictions of nonwhite characters are received, whereas the increase in critical feedback on fan work (facilitated by anonymity) has also been seen in other contexts.

Conclusion

The broad scope of this chapter is justified in order to locate the genre of

fan fiction within the various overlapping domains that inform it as a form of fan work and as a community-built structure. Tracing the multiple trajectories of both pornography and romance novels studies highlights the slippages that both these genres fail to take into account within the (assumed) correlations between viewers and readers. Fan fiction kink meme communities offer one way of interrogating the ways women approach the categories of pleasure and arousal, and how these are informed by the fannish notion of kink.

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By including an examination of how racial identity interrupts the assumed functioning of these domains, it becomes clear that an intersectional frame is crucial when approaching these categories in order to complicate the identity positions of participants in fandom spaces. An examination is necessary of the friction produced by the consideration of race on truisms of how fan works function vis-à-vis their relationship to an inhospitable canon, the role and meaning of escapism that such fan works enable, and the related idea of precarious pleasure as a mode of fannish interaction.

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CONCLUSION: TOWARD DECOLONIZING FAN STUDIES

Throughout this book, I have consistently discussed the need to decolonize fan studies. How can this be done in concrete terms? This is not an easy question to answer; indeed, the scholarship in the field continues to be dominated by white scholars. However, domination can be disrupted by consciously interrogating proposed methodologies when projects are initiated. As a thoroughly multidisciplinary field, fan studies drawn from wide range of methodological strategies, including anthropology (Bacon-Smith 1992), literary studies (Pugh 2005), cultural and media studies (Jenkins 1992), and psychoanalysis (Penley 1992). This multivocal approach is fruitful but has led to some persistent blind spots.

In their review of fan studies methodologies, Adrienne Evans and

Mafalda Stasi (2014) note that cultural and media studies as a discipline has always been marked by a suspicion of categorization and definitions. This has certainly been my own experience; I was encouraged to explore as many research directions as I could and allow my findings to lead me toward appropriate methodologies and theoretical frameworks. One popular methodological choice for fan studies has been ethnography, although, as Evans and Stasi point out, this particular approach has not been specifically identified as such in many accounts (Hills 2005). This hesitation can perhaps be traced to its identification with the operations of colonialism (Said 1978) and its implications for the relationship between the researcher and the fan community. Indeed, fan scholars have argued that ethnography often requires taking an outsider approach to the workings of a community, which also places the researcher

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in a position of interpretative power (Busse and Hellekson 2012; Freund and Fielding 2013). The relationship between researcher and fan community has sometimes been fraught; the position of the unbiased ethnographer can be seen to produce work “de-emphasizing the researcher’s fan positioning and potentially colonizing the fan. Meanwhile, in fan communities themselves, ‘academic’ positions have often been heavily managed and policed, where fans have reacted with concern about the possibility of being studied from the ‘outside’” (Evans and Stasi 2014, 11). My discomfort with the idea of “colonizing the fan” comes from my particular position as a nonwhite scholar as well as from a specifically postcolonial theoretical positioning. The framing of media fan communities as subcultural and powerless vis-à-vis the producers of popular media texts has also allowed for their unproblematic slotting into a vulnerable space that can be exploited by researchers for their own benefit. This use of specifically decolonial or postcolonial critiques of disciplines and practices such as anthropology and ethnography to characterize the workings of communities dominated by white women fans who continue to hold considerable institutional privilege compared to the nonwhite fans within those same spaces has had some troubling effects, as I discuss in Chapter 3, where I discuss fan activism. As Evans and Stasi (2014) note, “Fan communities can resemble political constituencies in their structure, activities and emotions . . ., but the potential for politicised fan activism needs to be realised in a specific situated context. For example, the increasing attention to fannish charitable enterprises such as the Harry Potter Alliance, which tackles a range of ‘social problems’ with the motto ‘the weapon we have is love,’ suggest[s] an individualised, depoliticised neoliberal approach to structural injustice” (18–19).

Such positioning requires more nuance, especially when the opera-

tions of race are being interrogated within such subcultural, queer-identified spaces. In the course of my research for this project, I found it difficult to approach incidents of overt and covert racism within these spaces. How does my position as a researcher, with its ethical responsibilities toward the spaces and participants I study, intersect with my research responsibilities toward highlighting power differentials between them? This is a difficult question, as was illustrated by my experiences while working on a coauthored paper on racial dynamics in fandoms that have accrued around queer female characters. Because I had provided specific examples of problematic fan art, which showed clear indications of racist and colonialist underpinnings, my

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coauthor and I received pushback from peer reviewers who were uncomfortable with such specificity. Their contention, which I also saw the significance of, concerned the ways in which this framing would highlight only certain individuals, perhaps opening them up to repercussions far beyond what was warranted for their production of problematic fan art in an online setting. My coauthor and I ultimately did decide to remove those specific references, as the essay was not concerned primarily with fan art; however, this process does illustrate how the more troubling instances of recorded prejudice within fandom spaces are rarely discussed. Whose safe spaces do these considerations privilege? What patterns of erasure and deferment are encoded into these practices? I have focused in this book on broad patterns of racism rather than identifying specific events—a compromise to accommodate competing needs for privacy, but a compromise that may elide the fact that racist controversies, actions, and discussions continue to be an everyday reality for nonwhite fans. This issue will continue to pose an ethical challenge to fan studies as a discipline; it also requires considerably more deliberation and debate within the field.

Relatedly, my experience of being an aca-fan has also been different

from how it has been broadly conceptualized in the field. Henry Jenkins uses the term “aca-fan” to acknowledge his dual identity as an academic and a fan (Jenkins, n.d.). It also acknowledges his implication within the affective investments he researches. Similarly, Matt Hills (2002) questions the ways that fan accounts are presented as largely uncontested fact by early fan studies researchers. For Hills, one of the results of these scholars’ early focus on pushing back against negative stereotypes of fans was that, ironically, their activities were framed almost dispassionately, without recognizing the biases and attachments that might inform them. To interrupt this process, Hills proposes that fan accounts be thoroughly scrutinized in order to interrogate the “moments of failures within narratives of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity, and [their] repetitions or privileged narrative constructions which are concerned with communal (or subcultural) justification in the face of ‘external’ hostility” (66). He also proposes that a self-reflexive autoethnographic exercise be performed whereby the academic fan’s “tastes, values, attachments and investments” (72) could be analyzed under the same rubric. Autoethnographers are asked to leverage methodological tools, research data, and existing literature to analyze cultural experiences and events while also considering how other participants might experience those same

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incidents. In this model, personal experience and reflection are encouraged to elucidate aspects of larger cultural events. It is easy to see why this methodology is attractive for fan scholars, many of whom are committed to blurring the researcher/subject divide. My experience with autoethnographic methods brought up dissonances in my positionality versus this divide but also as intersecting with my own racial, cultural, and ethnic identity.

In a slightly different positioning from that of Hills (2002), Kristina Busse

and Karen Hellekson (2012) encourage an embrace of multiple positions by the fan scholar so as to “treat the academic and fannish parts as equally important” (24). There has been some discussion regarding whether the loyalties of the scholar must be split so evenly, as this positioning might also serve to paper over power differentials within fan communities (Chin 2010). This splitting could also serve to deemphasize historical tensions around such topics as race, ethnicity, religion, class, and national identity. Autoethnography is clearly a powerful tool to chart the complex positions that fan researchers must negotiate during their research. Indeed, this is a methodological choice that I made myself. However, a confessional space can, and has, worked toward the disavowal of certain other power differentials between fan and researcher—and indeed among fans themselves. I refer, of course, to the ways racial identity operates within such spaces.

In the Introduction I comment on the ways in which race, when men-

tioned at all within fan studies scholarship, is in the same breath disavowed or deferred. The rhetorical strategy of maintaining that of course race is an essential axis of identity to be considered, but never with the same urgency as sexuality and gender, is frequently used in introductions to books, anthologies, and conference presentations. Sometimes there is an acknowledgment of the lack of attention to racial identity in a particular piece of research, which is then explained by a personal implication within whiteness. Of course, this fails to acknowledge whiteness itself as a racialized identity with specific effects (Frankenberg 1993; Hill 1997; Dyer 1997). I draw on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) analysis of what she terms a “politics of declaration” wherein such declarations of culpability or implication within axes of privilege function as a tactic of deferral: These statements function as claims to performativity rather than as performatives, whereby the declaration of whiteness is assumed to put in place the conditions in which racism can be transcended, or at the very least reduced

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in its power. Any presumption that such statements are forms of political action would be an overestimation of the power of saying, and even a performance of the very privilege that such statements claim they undo. The declarative mode, as a way of doing something, involves a fantasy of transcendence in which “what” is transcended is the very thing “admitted to” in the declaration: so, to put it simply, if we admit to being bad, then we show that we are good. (54)

This rhetorical strategy of deferment plays a key role in situating racial

identity as a rubric of analysis, the specific effects of which can be isolated to extraordinary incidents. Throughout this book I have tried to disrupt this, especially in Chapter 1, where I trace how the histories of nonwhite participation in fandom spaces are only made visible as a series of controversies, thus eliding their contributions to fandom spaces both online and off-line. It is within these considerations that I place my own research and choices of methodology. As I read this book today, I inevitably see much of my own journey, both personal and academic, reflected back at me. It is important here to register that my initial research proposal largely retreaded the truisms of fan studies, locating the effects of racialized identity as relevant to only certain aspects of fandom interaction. This initial framing was a product of the fact that my own awareness of the deep racialisation of media fan spaces and fan works formed only gradually, even while I engaged with these spaces within a critical academic framework and personal experience that had trained me to be alert to structural societal hierarchies, especially within popular cultural texts. Today this hesitation seems almost incomprehensible, but I recognize that it was rooted in the awareness that such an acknowledgment, without the attendant deferral onto larger societal influences, would mean that I would have to definitively give up my claim to belonging unproblematically in fan spaces. This would not be out of any pretensions of academic elitism but rather through a final recognition of their structural rejection of all aspects of my aca-fannish identity. To contrast this with the more generalized anxiety around this split in fan studies scholarship, my discomfort was not caused by some inherent incompatibility between my academic and fan identity but rather by the acknowledgment of my equal alienation from both.

Online media fandom communities have provided me with a way of

interacting on the internet that, as a girl from a small town in India in the 2000s, felt revolutionary. In these spaces, I could geek out with fellow fans

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and not be particularly judged about my obsessions with Western popular culture. My introduction to fan fiction was similarly eye-opening; I could interrogate my own notions of gender and sexuality in ways that were not a topic of discussion at home. For a long time I did not feel the need to bring my own particularly Indian forms of fandom into these spaces. I felt like my engagement with them was on different terms. In my head, such engagement was not suitable. But fandom also taught me digital skills. I learned to navigate the various byways of the internet even as I struggled to access those spaces on painfully slow dial-up connections before I had access to faster broadband.

Nonetheless, I now recognize that my participation in these spaces was

at a remove. I passed. I did not need to other myself: I was fluent in the language of media fandom in terms of both the English language and popular cultural knowledge—although of course this was not how I framed it to myself. I was simply a fangirl. Only gradually, through the recognition that there were other people within these same spaces who were talking about their identities and how it affected their fandom experiences, did I realize that I could stop curating my own identity quite so selectively. Flashpoint events like RaceFail ’09, and then the move to dialogic platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, led me to see nonwhite fans unapologetically boosting characters and stories that were important to them. I also observed how these activities pushed back at my own internalized assumptions about which narratives were important and which characters deserved to be the most popular focuses of fan work. When I maintain that whiteness is a structuring mechanism of fan studies and fan communities, this conclusion has been arrived at through both the data analyses performed as part of my research and self-reflexive questioning of my own unconscious biases.

The interviews I conducted opened up my theoretical horizons: non-

white fans recounted journeys much like mine. Again and again, these narratives registered the surprise of seeing others like them/me in fandom spaces. They also permitted me to see the alienation and dismissal that came from attempting to talk about issues of erasure. However, no single coherent thread of experience emerged through these interviews. Indeed, considering the diversity of identities within my respondent pool, it was comforting to see a wide range of responses to my questions. As Ahmed (2010) cogently points out,

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Writing about whiteness as a non-white person (a “non” that is named differently, or transformed into positive content differently, depending on where I am, who I am with, what I do) is not writing about something that is “outside” the structure of my ordinary experience, even my sense of “life as usual,” shaped as it is by the comings and goings of different bodies. And so writing about whiteness is difficult, and I have always been reluctant to do it. The difficulty may come in part from a sense that the project of making whiteness visible only makes sense from the point of view of those for whom it is invisible. (1) I would add to this that writing about nonwhiteness also places a unique burden on the researcher because a process of simplification and essentialism is required in order to provide a coherent critique. For instance, I agonized over the structuring of my interview schedule. I was keen to facilitate an adequately inclusive data-gathering instrument capable of reflecting the many facets of identity that my respondents might wish to record. By making it as open-ended and respondent led as I could, I obtained a truly staggering level of nuance and specificity. I also foregrounded the limitations of categories such as “nonwhite,” “fan of color,” and “racial identity.” Yet although I did my utmost to reflect the messiness of such engagements by choosing appropriate theoretical structures concerned with the nonlinearity of such engagements, the strictures of academic writing and presentation meant that some simplification was unavoidable. To combat such oversimplifications, more scholarship is required—scholarship that takes up the field’s fault lines and silences as a challenge and as an invitation to do better.

One of my primary concerns in this book was to balance the US-cen-

tricity of the fan texts and spaces that are the focus of my analysis with an awareness of the complex ways that categories like racial identity operate in different contexts and locales across the global mediascape. The wide scope of nascent scholarship is invigorating, and I am sure that future fandom scholars will have a much deeper well to draw on than I did at the start of this project. Even more work on these areas is underway, with a second special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on race scheduled for 2019 publication. The theoretical and disciplinary boundaries that have so far curtailed the scope of identity articulation within generalized considerations of the activities of media or participatory fandom are being energetically questioned. This is obviously a positive development; it can only be to the

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advantage of fan studies as a discipline to engage more critically with its own theoretical biases and blind spots.

It is also heartening to see the same research directions that this project

has pushed toward reflected in upcoming work. It has been my repeated contention that fan studies needs to take seriously the challenges issued by African American scholars (Wanzo 2015; Warner 2014, 2015a, 2015b; D. Johnson 2015). One of my key questions has concerned how to respond to these challenges while also expanding the scope of what the operations of racial, cultural, and ethnic identity might look like in a globalized, neoliberal, and neocolonial fanscape. Part of the answer lies in a serious commitment toward the diversification of theoretical frameworks, utilizing approaches that foreground the operations of racial identity—including whiteness— explicitly, rather than approaches that place them in an othered space. If equal attention is paid to the racialization of fannish modes of activity, nuanced scholarship will result. This will also alleviate concerns that, at a time when fans and audiences are more diverse than ever before, fan studies remains a niche—and extremely white—field of study.

This trajectory will be particularly productive along the lines of com-

plicating the simplistic fangirl/fanboy binary that is currently a common theme in many conceptualizations of fan activity. The view that male fans participate in more easily monetized and acceptable modes of fannishness, whereas female fans are more likely to be seen as transgressive and unmanageable from a producer or marketer point of view, has gained some currency (Scott 2009; Stanfill 2013; Busse 2013a). Yet such a fanboy/ fangirl division completely elides the differential experiences of nonwhite male fans within these shared spaces, whether online or in physical spaces like conventions. For instance, when Japanese video game company Niantic released an enhanced reality version of the classic game Pokémon Go in July 2016, it took the world by storm. This phenomenon was the source of much interest for fan studies scholars, prompting a great deal of immediate commentary discussing its leveraging of nostalgia, its effect on individuals managing depression, its implications for traffic safety, and its transformation of public and private spaces, among other aspects of game play and interface (Vaynerchuk 2016; Eadicicco 2016; Needleman 2016; Parkin 2016). A further, more critical layer to these considerations only emerged when nonwhite academic commentators and popular culture bloggers began to discuss the different experiences of players depending on their racial identities.

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White players were less likely than Black players to be targeted by overzealous neighborhood watches and police officials for trespassing and other infringements (Akil 2016; Subramanian 2016).

Considerations of access to fan spaces, both online and in physical loca-

tions, are therefore distinctly different for nonwhite fans. Other examples of these concerns abound: What do the cases of the fatal police shootings of Darrien Hunt and John Crawford III, two Black American men who were holding a toy sword and gun, respectively, mean about the differential experiences of fan practices like cosplay in public spaces (Romano 2014)? What do virulent pushbacks against the casting of Black actors like John Boyega and Zendaya in iconic popular cultural franchises like Star Wars and Spider-Man—which are also reflected within women-identified media fandom spaces—mean for analyses that focus only on gendered aspects of these interactions? Only by choosing inclusive theoretical frames that demand an awareness of these intersections can fan scholars engage critically with these core questions.

As I have demonstrated throughout this analysis, the choice of a cyber-

cultural postcolonial framework has worked productively toward this very goal. Such a theoretical framework centers race, ethnicity, and national identity in considerations of gender and sexuality; it also offers a whole new set of tools to consider the operations of meaning making within fan communities. Specifically, in Chapter 4, my deployment of postcolonial cyberculture enabled me to engage with not just individual incidents of racism in fan spaces but also theories of their underlying enabling mechanism. This led me to the idea of the fandom algorithm, which identifies both the racist underpinnings of the technologies deployed by fandom communities and the communitarian norms that dismiss racism as sporadic interruptions of a progressive norm. This neologism takes its impetus from postcolonial cyberculture theory’s insistence that all technosocial engagements must be analyzed while considering multiple and intersecting operations of representational and communicative power. Thus, although articulating the complexity of individual fan identities and their diverse experiences vis-àvis engaging with popular cultural texts has been extremely challenging, I am confident that this challenge has made my scholarship more robust and more reflective of the reality of contemporary fan spaces. Much more work remains to be done, of course, but I hope that this book can go some way toward illuminating possible pathways for the field as a whole to move toward more inclusive paradigms.

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This shift also demands a reconsideration of the role and meaning of

pleasure within media fandom spaces. Coppa (2017) uses the metaphor of dining together to describe fandom communities. Riffing off a fan essay, she observes, “Fanfiction is a banquet that fans make together, with everyone cooking and diners prized as much as cooks” (10). This metaphor is quite striking to me because one of the first questions that I raised in my own work, borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s (2010) notion of feminist killjoys, was around what it meant to be positioned as a fandom killjoy in the context of highlighting the operations of race and racism within fan spaces. Ahmed’s narration of the process of alienation from shared pleasure, which also uses the metaphor of dining together, provides a thoughtful counter: We begin with a table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. You are becoming tense; it is becoming tense. How hard to tell the difference between what is you and what is it! You respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,” recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. In speaking up or speaking out, you upset the situation. That you have described what was said by another as a problem means you have created a problem. You become the problem you create.

To be the object of shared disapproval, those glances that can cut you up,

cut you out. An experience of alienation can shatter a world. The family gathers around the table; these are supposed to be happy occasions. How hard we work to keep the occasion happy, to keep the surface of the table polished so that it can reflect back a good image of the family. So much you are not supposed to say, to do, to be, in order to preserve that image. If you say, or do, or be anything that does not reflect the image of the happy family back to itself, the world becomes distorted. You become the cause of a distortion. You are the distortion you cause. Another dinner, ruined. To become alienated from a picture can allow you to see what that picture does not and will not reflect.

This framing of an interloper at a shared table who ruins things because

of a lack of knowledge or concern for the etiquette that facilitates commonly felt pleasure becomes even more powerful when placed in context of media fandom spaces, where the food that is served is placed within the context of

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a gift economy. Ahmed’s last line—“To become alienated from a picture can allow you to see what that picture does not and will not reflect”—is particularly relevant to my theorization about the personal nature of this alienation. The continued erasure of nonwhite characters from the picture that media fandom (re)presents produces a keenly felt alienation.

The position of the fandom killjoy is a complex one to occupy because

it brings into focus the tension between media fandom’s simultaneous embrace and disavowal of the politics of pleasure. By using the term “politics of pleasure,” I gesture toward the anachronistic argument that argues for two simultaneously oppositional positions. The first: fan work produced around popular cultural texts is significant because it is evidence of the transformational, transgressive pleasure taken in such texts by women-identified (and often queer) fans whose activities are broadly reviled by mainstream society. The second: the same fan work cannot be held accountable for its depiction or erasure of other intersecting marginalized identities (particularly around the axes of race) because its leveraging of pleasure can only work within the biases of the texts themselves.

These contradictory positions cannot be left uninterrogated. This valo-

rization of fan work as the basis of certain aspects of individual fan identity must extend to a sustained critique. To continually defer a consideration of the ways in which whiteness structures modes of fan pleasure is—at this stage of our knowledge about fan communities—to actively participate in furthering the operations of white privilege. Relatedly, it is vital to stop the practice of using universalizing labels such as “transgressive” or “transformative” pleasure without explicitly identifying whom these definitions exclude. Terms like “heteronormative,” “heteropatriarchal,” “escapism,” and even “sexual fantasy” are highly context specific and are inflected by different historical considerations. As I look forward to more scholarship in these areas, I am eager to see what other theoretical frameworks can be brought into the conversation about contemporary fan cultures, including those of Afrofuturism, critical race studies, and of course postcolonialism.

This is an exciting time to be a fan studies scholar, especially in the con-

text of growing interest in the ways meaning making occurs with regard to popular cultural texts in the transmedia age, whose effects are now more “glocalized” than ever before. That is to say, multinational entertainment corporations are increasingly adapting to a global marketplace. This can be seen in the specific targeting of local populations by Hollywood studios, as

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seen in the massive publicity blitz around the release of The Force Awakens (2015) in China, or in the specialized marketing around Disney’s new iteration of The Jungle Book (2016) in India (Frater 2016). In the case of the latter, Disney leveraged facets of other locally familiar adaptations of Rudyard Kipling’s original narrative—using the same voice actors and opening jingles—to create a remarkably intertextual narrative that interweaves a globalized text with elements grounded in localized markers of identity (Pande 2016b). It seems inevitable that other media production houses will also use such strategies. This opens up exciting avenues to consider crossover fan audiences in the context of the operations of the socioeconomics of globalization and neocolonialism.

There is also some excellent scholarship emerging out of a reconsid-

eration of the changing modes in relations between fans and producers, particularly within the context of the collapsing distance between them resulting from the influence of social media platforms. Scholars are engaging with these dynamics in many ways, including analyzing the operations of fan management in the context of public relations and considering issues of ethics and privacy (Hutchins and Tindall 2016; Bennett, Chin, and Jones 2016) while conducting research within these new configurations.

Finally, while the expansion of the scope of fan studies in the third wave

to include nontransformational fan activity is a welcome development, I also contest the notion that this broadening must mean the dismissal of the former spaces entirely (Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss 2007a). As Stein (2015) argues, there is still much to be learned from the meaning-making interactions that take place in such spaces, especially with the use of more inclusive frameworks. Far from being irrelevant or niche, media fandom spaces are more diverse, more mainstream, more vocal, more conflicted, and more articulate about these issues than ever before. Although the challenges of encapsulating the complexity of these exchanges around identity articulations, evolving arguments about the nature and function of fan work, and negotiating differential modes of fan pleasure are daunting, they are far from insurmountable. This book is only one step toward crafting newer, more self-reflexive, and more critical approaches toward media fandom spaces. It is my hope that its intervention is judged to be a substantive one and that its gaps provide an impetus for yet more scholarship.

NOTES TO PAGES 000–000

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Introduction 1. Whiteness as a monolithic category or default has been complicated by numerous theorists (Frankenberg 1993; Lipsitz 2006; Nakayama and Krizek 1995; Roediger 1999, 2006). This applies to fandom participants as well. However, as Spivak (1990) has theorized, identity positions are often articulated strategically by minority groups in order to gain visibility. 2. The Organization for Transformative Works was established in 2007 and is a fan-run and fan-funded nonprofit organization that hosts one of the largest archives of fan work. It also performs legal advocacy and outreach initiatives to support fan creators.

Chapter 1 1. The term “cyberspace” has been used to refer to both computer-mediated communication systems and virtual environments since its popularization by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984). There is no universally accepted definition, but in line with Morningstar and Farmer (1991), I use the term to refer to the communicative space that has been facilitated by the use of a large variety of internet-mediated technologies. In my work, the communicative and creative exchanges that are facilitated primarily by cyberspace thus defined (though off-line elements may also be present) are termed “cybercultural.” 2. Cynthia Walker (2013) dates the first The Man from U.N.C.L.E mailing list to 1995. 3. Akazukin Cha Cha (1994–95) and Ruoroni Kenshin (1996–98) are Japanese manga series adapted into anime shows. 4. There are a dizzying variety of genres and subgenres of manga texts available, and although they are prescriptively labeled, there is a great deal of crossover in terms of readership. For the purposes of this chapter, the genres most often identified are shounen, which are comics aimed at young boys, and shoujo, which are aimed at young girls. More niche

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genres like yuri, featuring lesbian relationships, and yaoi boys’ love, featuring gay relationships, are also relevant. For an in-depth discussion, see Bryce and Davis (2010).

Chapter 2 1. Thanks to Paul Booth for this observation about the meta moment. 2. The most recent case of such demarcation can be seen in the Paul Feig–directed remake of the iconic SF/F film Ghostbusters (1984) starring an all-woman cast. The film was the target of a concerted campaign to discredit it even before its release, mainly by white male fans of the original film. This was analyzed as stemming from misogyny toward women encroaching on traditionally male-coded nerd spaces (Sims 2016; Dvorak 2016; Preza 2016). However, after a successful opening at the box office in July 2016, its only African American star, Leslie Jones, was the target of a barrage of racially coded abuse. This singling out, along with the silence from her white costars and usually vocal white feminist commentators, highlights the need for intersectional approaches to such controversies (Lasha 2016). 3. The term “OTT-SJW-ing” means “over the top—social justice warrior–ing.” The term “social justice warrior” (SJW) is a derogatory reference to individuals who are vocal about social issues in online spaces. Although online fandom spaces are generally seen as receptive to socially liberal opinions, some vocal individuals are perceived as too extreme in their views.

Chapter 3 1. Darfur, in western Sudan, has been in the grip of civil war since 2003. At one point described by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the conflict has claimed thousands of lives and has displaced millions more. For more information, see Flint and De Waal (2005). 2. The term “racebending” has had various uses that I will explore later, but in the context of this campaign, it was also a play on an aspect of world building of the television show itself. In the narrative, certain individuals have the gift of manipulating the elements of air, wind, water, and fire. This manipulation is termed as the practice of “bending,” with each ability being expressed as a concatenation: airbending, waterbending, earthbending, and so on. 3. Mako Mori, played by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi, was the lead character of Pacific Rim (2013), an SF/F action thriller directed by Guillermo Del Toro. The unusual choice of casting a Japanese actress in the lead role of a major English-language film was discussed in fandom spaces, particularly because the narrative did not focus on a romantic angle for her character. 4. The casting of Noma Dumezweni, a Black actress, to play the role of Hermione in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child prompted some backlash but also saw Rowling maintain that Hermione’s racial identity was never specified in canon (Hooton 2015). Despite

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Rowling’s willingness to put her weight behind the subversive casting, it is clear that the character was originally written as white, and Rowling certainly never commented on the casting of Emma Watson to play the role in the film versions. However, the incident does point to the ways in which racebending is practiced within and outside fandom spaces.

Chapter 4 1. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a contemporary political organization in the United States engaged in protesting about and raising awareness of racial discrimination against African Americans in various societal spheres, most notably with regard to police brutality. The movement involves many queer activists, including founding members Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza (Bradford Edwards and Harris 2016; Garza 2016). 2. My estimation of the popularity of works on AO3 is based on the number of positive votes (kudos) that they receive. The MCU fandom is a large one, with Steve Rogers (102,834 fics) and Tony Stark (86,328 fics) emerging as primary-focus characters; the pairings Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes (32,522 fics) and Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (23,319 fics) are the most popular. All data concerning fics were collected on May 13, 2018. Site data can be complicated by tagging characters in works that do not feature them as major protagonists. Even so, no nonwhite character appears in the top ten stand-alone characters or pairings listed on the archive. The pairing of Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson, which makes up the bulk of the writing in which Wilson has a primary role, only has 2,264 fics listed. 3. Spock has been seen as occupying a complicated racial/ethnic identity in the Star Trek narrative, as he is positioned as half human and half Vulcan and has been the target of xenophobic discrimination from both societies. This is complicated further in the original series: Spock is played by a Jewish actor, Leonard Nimoy. However, as theorists have pointed out, SF narratives often deal with racism in metaphorical terms but allow these debates to play out on primarily white-coded bodies (Delany 2000; Hopkinson 2004). These metaphors often collapse when brought into conversation with racialized bodies, as was the case when the original Star Trek attempted to deal with Native American issues in “The Paradise Syndrome” (1968). Fandom texts also often play out these same dynamics. 4. Young Justice (2010–13), an animated television series, was broadcast on the Cartoon Network in the United States. It follows the lives of teenage superheroes affiliated with the DC Comics universe, including the character of Aqualad or Kaldur’ahm, referenced here. 5. The series referenced here is the BBC show Merlin (2008–12). The fandom around the show was a prolific one, with most fan work concentrating around the characters of Arthur (Bradley Cooper) and Merlin (Colin Morgan). The character of Guinevere was played by Angel Coulby, and her brother, Elyan, was played by Adetomiwa Edun, both Black English actors. 6. All these characters are popular figures in fan work and are based on popular archetypes. Willow Rosenberg is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Charlie Eppes from Numb3rs (2005–10), Newton Geiszler from Pacific Rim (2013), Tony Stark from Marvel comics and MCU, Fox Mulder from The X-Files (1993–2002), and Felicity Smoak from Arrow (2012–).

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7. The references in this response are to the fandom around the US National Hockey League. The specific team referred to is the Chicago Blackhawks, which has a logo depicting a Native American chieftain. Blackhawks fans often wear imitation headdresses or carry fake tomahawks to games to signal their team identity. 8. Smallville (2001–11) follows Clark Kent (Superman) as a youth. The show spawned a large slash-dominated fandom around the pairing of Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and his friend turned archnemesis, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). The character referenced here is Pete Ross (Sam Jones III), Clark’s best friend.

Chapter 5 1. Williams (1989) retracts this position later in her work, observing that her conceptualization of niche audiences is not flexible enough to account for their heterogeneity. Nonetheless, this structuring continues to be seen in contemporary pornography studies. 2. There has been some interest in the phenomenon of heterosexual women watching gay pornography, but this is framed as an exceptional case, and further fluidity in such audiences has not been considered (Marks 1996). 3. Here I point to the lack of attention that lesbian-produced textual pornography has received. For instance, even while the periodical On Our Backs occupies a central position in any discussion of the development of lesbian pornography, Susie Bright’s work on textual pornography is largely ignored in favor of her films. Bright’s contention that it was lesbian pornographic writing that in large part motivated her to produce more experimental explicit material aimed at a general category of women, without that label signifying only heterosexual women, was a radical step that has been overlooked in the study of both pornography and romance novel studies. 4. One of the most influential discussions is known as the Trigger Warning Debate. Among the issues discussed were the highly personal nature of triggers and to what extent authors’ responsibility to warn extended. Some commentators saw the demands as a form of censorship, especially when diverse issues, such as consensual BDSM sex and sexual assault, were grouped together. The pejorative association of warnings with specific morally gray areas, such as pairings that revolved around individuals with large age differences or uneven power dynamics, was also discussed. These debates are far from over, although warnings—or at least notes that warn readers that the writer specifically chooses not to warn—are now more common (“Trigger Warning Debate,” Fanlore.org). 5. In one episode in 2007, now known as Strikethrough, LiveJournal caved to pressure from antipornography groups and suspended 500 personal journals as well as communities identified as dealing with explicit material. The response to this was one of the impulses behind the founding of OTW in order to find better, less vulnerable platforms to host fan content. This resulted in the creation of AO3 (“Strikethrough and Boldthrough,” Fanlore.org). 6. The fandom currently has 185,071 fics listed in AO3. The kink meme is one of the longest running and indexed, since 2009. 7. It is tempting to see this split as indicative of a distaste for incestuous pairings, and

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some fans certainly express those feelings. However, as Flegel and Roth (2010) point out, many writers write both Sam and Dean slash and J2 RPF. The Supernatural kink meme hosts both, although some negotiations are needed. The popular character of Castiel (Misha Collins) was introduced in the fourth season, which led to a shift in shipping patterns. However, this shift is not relevant to my observations of the evolution of the form of the fandom’s kink meme.

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INDEX

229

INDEX

aca-fan, 187–189 African American (fandom), 60, 81, 113. See also Carrington, André M; Johnson, Dominique Deirdre; Wanzo, Rebecca; Warner, Kirstin Ahmed, Sara, 13, 188, 190, 194–195. See also fandom killjoy anime (fandom), 26–27; as cross-cultural fandom spaces, 37–43. See also manga (fandom) anonymity, 23–24. See also kink meme antifan, 117 AO3 survey, 180. See also centrumlumina (fan) Archive of Our Own (AO3), 11, 96–97, 139–143. See also Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) authenticity, 55–56, 73, 75, 82–90, 96, 97, 102–103, 107, 147; in pornography, 149–150, 153–155. See also Hall, Stuart; Jackson, John L Avatar: The Last Airbender, 16, 82–83, 89, 113 Bacon-Smith, Camille, 2, 57, 117, 146, 163, 165, 180, 185 Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia, 121 Baym, Nancy, 23–24, 35, 51 BDSM, 167, 171, 200n4 Bennet, Alanna, 102

Benwell, Bethan, 56 Black Lives Matter, 121–123, 199n1 #BlackTwitter, 45–46, 60, 76 Bongie, Chris, 56 Booth, Paul, 58, 63, 97, 129, 145, 165, 198n1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3 boyd, danah, 35, 50 Bright, Susie, 155–156, 200n3 #BringBackOurGirls, 47–48 Bury, Rhiannon, 25–26, 28, 35, 51 Busse, Kristina, 2, 5, 13, 58, 63, 112, 117–118, 120, 124–125, 126, 130, 139, 163–164, 171, 186, 188, 192 Carrington, André M, 8, 128 Castells, Manuel, 47–50 censorship, 28, 63, 152, 155, 200n4 centrumlumina (fan), 164, 180 Chandrasekera, Vajra, 90–92 Chin, Bertha, 60–61, 112, 129–130, 133, 145, 188, 196 Clerc, Susan, 22–25 colorism, 109. See also race community. See fandom contrapuntal reading, 105–107. See also Said, Edward Coppa, Francesca, 26, 35, 59, 74, 124, 130, 163, 166, 179, 194 cosplay, 59, 145, 193

230 de Certeau, Michel, 2 Derecho, Abigail, 124–125, 163 destinationtoast (fan), 11 digital infrastructure (fandom), 26–27, 34–37, 139–144 Driscoll, Catherine, 146, 147, 160, 163, 177–178 Dworkin, Andrea, 148 entitlement (fandom), 76–77 escapism, 133–139 Evans, Adrienne, 185–186 Everett, Anna, 60, 140 fail-fandomanon (LiveJournal community), 119–120 fan (identity), 57–62, 70–73, 95; and gender/sexuality, 3–5, 22–27, 95, 113–114, 124–127, 136, 180–181; and race, 3, 5–7, 12, 30, 39–43, 64–66, 89–90, 92–96, 102–103, 111–117, 131–133, 181–183; and religion, 19, 79, 98–99 fan as activist, 59, 77–84. See also Racebending.com fan fiction: and embodied response, 156, 178–180; gender and sexuality, 35–37, 163–16; genres, 146; intertextuality, 117–124; relationship to canon, 129–133, 177–178; subversion, 124–129; tropes, 118, 127–128, 131–132, 135, 182–183 fan labor, 4, 22, 26, 58, 131 fan of color, 28, 90–96 fan studies, 2–9, 42, 58, 112–115, 145, 185–196; ethics, 187; intersectionality, 193; race, 60–61, 112–114; whiteness, 6–9, 12–13 fandom: as community, 13, 21–25, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 58–59, 66, 89–90, 117–124; and conflict, 9–14, 28–34, 63–64, 68–69, 133–134; as gift economy, 141, 171, 194–195. See also racism (fandom) fandom algorithm, 16, 115–117, 132, 135, 139–144 fandom killjoy, 13–17, 194–195 fanlore.org, 11, 28, 31, 33, 166, 200nn4–5 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, 103–105

INDEX

Fathallah, Judith, 131 femslash, 126–127, 129, 131–132, 142, 146, 164–166, 171–172 fetishization, 153–154; gay, 126, 151; lesbian, 150; racialized, 151, 181. See also kink meme; pornography Fifty Shades of Grey, 4, 145, 157, 160 Fiske, John, 3, 9, 112, 129, 141 Flegel, Monica, 4, 131, 147, 173, 201n7 Foucault, Michel, 25 Fung, Richard, 149, 181, 183 #Gamergate, 136 gender. See fan (identity) genderbending, 100, 171; regendering, 126 GIF fic, 100, 105 girl!penis, 171 glocal, 71, 195. See also Robertson, Ronald Gray, Herman, 113 Gray, Jonathan, 3, 58, 112, 117–118, 120, 127, 130, 139, 196 Green, Shoshanna, 60, 113 Hall, Stuart, 55, 84–85 Hannibal, 7, 128 Hardt, Michael, 49, 54, 61 Harry Potter, 68, 78, 98, 101–105, 107–108, 173 Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) (organization), 78–79, 186 head canon, 97–99, 103–105 Hellekson, Karen, 2–3, 5, 63, 124, 141, 171, 186, 188 heteronormative, 13, 125, 128, 130, 151, 159, 173, 195 Hills, Matt, 2–3, 20, 57, 117, 185, 187–188 history (fandom), 12; online, 22–26, 28, 34–43 History of Magic in North America, 107 Huggan, Graham, 56 Hunger Games, 100–101 identity (online), 46–53 incest, 173, 175, 200n7 intersectionality, 8, 77–81, 89–90, 98, 114, 121, 124, 182, 184, 193, 198n2 interview (with fans), 25, 29–30, 35–37,

231

INDEX

42–43, 63–69, 73, 89–90, 92–96, 98, 105, 136–138 Invisible Children (organization), 79–80 Jackson, John L, 86–88, 94, 99, 103 Jemisin, N. K., 33–34, 65 Jenkins, Henry, 2–4, 27, 56–57, 59, 60, 74, 78, 117, 129, 185, 187 Johnson, Dominique Deirdre, 114–116, 192 Jones, Bethan, 117, 145, 196 journal sites, 18, 63–64, 147, 166. See also LiveJournal Juffer, Jane, 150, 155–156 K., Adrienne, 107–108 kink (fandom), 158, 167–178; and race, 182 Kink Bingo (fandom community), 168–170 kink meme, 16–17, 166–167, 173–183; and anonymity, 170–172; and fetishization, 177; and race, 181–183 Kinsale, Laura, 158 Kony 2012, 79–80. See also Invisible Children (organization) Kustritz, Anne, 61–62, 112, 146 Lamb, Patricia Frazer, 4 language use (fandom), 6, 37–38, 41, 61, 68, 94, 112, 190; bi/multilingual, 18, 42–43; codeswitching, 42 Larsen, Katherine, 5, 27, 29, 117, 145, 172, 178 LiveJournal, 18, 30, 33, 36, 63–64, 68, 82, 119, 139, 147, 166, 168, 180, 200n5 Lopez, Lori Kido, 82–83, 85, 89, 113 Lothian, Alexis, 118, 126, 139–140, 163–164, 171 MacKinnon, Catherine, 148 mailing lists, 24–26, 29–30, 63–64, 197n2 mammy stereotype, 142, 151 manga (fandom), 26–27, 37–43, 197nn3–4 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), 10, 119, 142–143, 199nn2–6 masculinity: and race, 113–114, 144, 149, 162 meta, 11, 96–97, 99, 104–105, 119, 122–123, 128, 142, 198n1. See also head canon; racebending

misogyny, 114, 127, 198n2 Misra, Sulagna, 119–120 Moitra, Swati, 5, 127, 142, 164 Morimoto, Lori, 6, 60–61, 112 mpreg (male pregnancy), 125 Nakamura, Lisa, 16, 50, 52, 115–116, 140, 143 Nayar, Pramod, 69–70 Negri, Antonio, 49, 54, 61 Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), 11, 96, 139, 197n2, 200n5 #OscarsSoWhite, 76, 81 Pande, Rukmini, 5, 127, 142, 164, 196 participatory culture. See fandom Penley, Constance, 2–4, 117, 146, 159–160, 163–164, 185 Perez, Nitasha, 100 platform usage (fandom), 22–26, 62–69, 97–98, 141–143. See also Archive of Our Own (AO3); journal sites; mailing lists; Tumblr; Twitter pleasure (in fandom), 13, 17, 95, 113–114, 124–125, 136, 139, 151–152, 156–158, 177–178, 181–183, 194–196 Pokémon Go, 192 pornography: and authenticity, 149–150, 154; gay, 149–150, 153; heterosexual, 149–151, 154, 156; history, 147–149; lesbian, 149–150, 153; online, 152–153; queer, 153–155; and race, 150–152, 154–155; relationship to romance, 146–147; textual, 146 postcolonialism, 53–57; cybercultural theory, 48–49, 52–53, 69–73 Pottermore.com, 104 Puar, Jasbir, 84, 122 Pugh, Sheenagh, 118, 127, 133, 163, 185 Puwar, Nirmal, 87 queerbaiting, 131 race, 83; 86–92, 107, 115–116; scientific constructions of, 85; in digital environments, 140; and sexuality, 181–82. See also whiteness

232 racebending, 82, 96, 99–109, 138, 198n2, 199n4 Racebending.com, 82–83, 89, 100, 103 RaceFail ’09, 33–34, 64–65, 67, 82, 114, 190 racism (fandom): controversies, 9–14, 58–59, 80, 84, 100–101, 108–109, 128–129, 165; fan commentary on, 32–33, 73, 103–104, 129, 134; relation to tropes, 11, 143–144, 182–183 Radway, Janice, 157–158 Ramon, Cisco (character), 134–135 real person fiction (RPF), 137, 173, 175, 177, 201n7 Reid, Robin Anne, 13, 99–100, 113–114, 126, 164 representation, 54–55, 82–85; politics of, 84–85. See also Hall, Stuart Robertson, Ronald, 71 Robinson, Gemma, 56 Rogers, Steve (character), 119–124, 142–143, 199n2 romance (novel): authenticity, 155–156; heterosexual, 158–159; interracial, 128; masturbation, 156–158, 160–161; queer, 159, 162; and race, 161–162; reader position, 158–162; relationship to pornography, 146–147; relationship to erotica, 155–156 Roth, Jenny, 4 Rowling, J. K., 78, 99, 102–105, 107, 199n4 Russ, Joanna, 4, 59, 117, 126, 163, 165 Said, Edward, 16, 54, 105–106, 185 Sandvoss, Cornel, 3, 117, 127, 196 scanlation, 39–43 science fiction and fantasy (fandom), 2, 33–34, 64, 114, 198n2, 198n3 Scodari, Christine, 29, 125–126, 129 Scott, Suzanne, 4, 130, 131, 141, 145, 192 Shadowhunters, 135 Shah, Nishant, 52, 69, 180 ship war, 129 slash, 2, 4, 10–11, 28, 31, 42–43, 59, 96, 117, 124–129, 131–132, 142, 145–146, 159–160, 164–166, 170–171, 173, 200n8, 201n7

INDEX

Snitow, Ann, 148, 156 Spivak, Gayatri, 54–55, 197n1 Stanfill, Mel, 4, 5, 27, 117, 192 Star Trek, 4, 6, 31, 78, 128, 164, 167, 199nn2–3 Star Wars, 8–11, 193 Stasi, Mafalda, 185–186 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne, 21, 46 Stonewall, 122 Supernatural, 10, 130, 167, 172–176, 201n7 tags (content), 116, 139–143, 175; content warnings, 172; debate, 200n4 Te (fan), 31 The 100, 80 The Flash, 134–135 The Force Awakens, 9–11, 32, 84, 108, 131, 196 The Legend of Korra, 135 Tosenberger, Catherine, 36, 101, 126, 173 transcultural fandom, 6, 60–61, 113 Transformative Works and Cultures, 5, 79, 113, 191 trigger warnings. See tags (content) Trouble, Courtney, 154–155 Tumblr, 46, 63, 65–69, 82, 89, 97–98, 100, 104, 106–107, 123, 131–132, 140–143, 164, 180, 190 Tushnet, Rebecca, 130, 172 Twilight, 4 Twitter, 45–47, 60, 63, 65–69, 76, 121, 130, 164, 190 Uhura, Nyota (character), 128–129 Veith, Diane, 2, 4, 59, 117, 163, 165 Velazquez, Maria, 29, 102 Walker, Cynthia, 197n2 Wall, Amanda, 170, 176–177, 179–180 wank, 28–29 Wanzo, Rebecca, 8–9, 12, 58, 81, 111–113, 136, 192 Warner, Kirsten, 9, 60, 113, 192 whiteness, 7–8, 188–191, 197n1; in fan studies, 6–9, 12, 16, 107, 110, 112, 114,

INDEX

188, 192; in fandom spaces, 34, 44, 66, 100–101, 124, 140–141, 183, 190, 195; in online environments, 24, 28, 29, 140; tropes, 127 Wilson, Sam (character), 121–124, 142–143, 182, 199n2 Woledge, Elizabeth, 146, 165 Wood, Andrea, 159–160

233 yaoi, 41, 42, 43, 198n4 Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK), 134, 172 yuri, 198n4 Zubernis, Lynn, 5, 27, 29, 117, 145, 172, 178

234

INDEX